


Masser New, Secundus Waning

by Xyshurondor



Category: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: F/M, Morrowind, No Smut, Third Age, Third Era, Vvardenfell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 15:05:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 86,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13273995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xyshurondor/pseuds/Xyshurondor
Summary: Noro Laend is a skooma addict in the sewers of St. Olms when a fast-talking Khajiit Restorationist crosses his path and changes his life forever - but will it be for the better?  Rated explicit for graphic violence and some horror/suspense elements.  Now complete.An original universe version of this story is now available on Kindle Books as well, but apparently I'm not allowed to link that here under the TOS.  I apologize for plugging it earlier when I wasn't aware.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It is after a considerable hiatus that I return, somewhat older, a little wiser, and a bit happier and healthier, to try my hand at this fanfiction thing again (welcome to those who came here from my old fanfiction.net account, SickleYield). I've been doing a lot of roleplaying in the interim. You can find the results of some of that edited into novel form on my combined account, ManiacsOfTamriel. 
> 
> It has been my custom, before I start off into one of these novellas, to explain in the introduction what lore I acknowledge and what I intend to make up. This is particularly important to the Elder Scrolls series because its lore has fluxed more than somewhat in the (so far) 21 years or so that the franchise has existed.
> 
> So, the lore of this story.
> 
> According to the UESP wiki and Bethesda's own game wikis, Morrowind takes place in about 3E 427, and the adventures of the Nerevarine in the game basically fit within that year (the player can actually complete the main quest in an in-game week or over in-game lifetimes). The Tribunal lost Kagrenac's Tools and began to lose their power (and in Almalexia's case, began the long slide into insanity) in 3E 417. So I place this story in the timeline at around 3E 424, whether or not the characters should see fit to mention it.
> 
> Since events take place in that time and in Vvardenfell, the universe rules of Vvardenfell apply with regard to teleportation, levitation, and other magics that differ across Nirn and across time. Even then, though, the ES series has always indicated magics exist that the player never accesses, especially forms of transportation involving portals between planes and within the plane of Nirn, and certain types of visualizations of past places and events. I will consider myself allowed to invent spells if I find it convenient or useful to do so and those spells do not seem to me to break lore (as will immediately be obvious with Sahrid's Cleanse spell). I've assigned a rough “point” value to each of Sahrid's spells and to her maximum magicka so that I can keep track of what she has vs. what she's used.
> 
> I'm not sure how so many Khajiit in Vvardenfell can be suthay-raht, when that requires them to have all been born in the same phase of the moons, but maybe some sort of very strict, very odd birth control is being practiced. Anyway, that is the Wiki's assertion, not mine. I will feel free to throw that out for individual families (as will become obvious). Originally I incorrectly referred to a characters an an ohmes-raht when she is in fact an ohmes (ohmes-raht are larger and very slightly furry; in fact the suffice 'raht' in general seems to mean 'larger and somewhat furrier' if I read my sources correctly).
> 
> Lore is inconsistent on the effects of the precursor moon sugar (apparently a stimulant) versus the finished drug skooma (which the wiki calls a “narcotic,” which would have an opposite set of effects). The game tends to have its paraphernalia littered around areas that suggest addicts lay around dreaming, like opium addicts, instead of running around hyperactive like meth addicts, so I'm going with narcotic. It is presented in the games as a drinkable liquid as well as some form that can be smoked, which I assume to be a dry solid. 
> 
> Similarly, lore is inconsistent about the longevity of various races of mer. Estimates vary from “around 200” to “thousands and thousands of years.” It seems agreed that 200 is definitely the lowest probable estimate for most, and the 4,000+ achieved by Divayth Fyr is a result of sorcery and not natural life span.
> 
> I will always make something up to give a definite detail in my story's setting rather than dance vaguely around it. This means I will at some points diverge from future Word of God on things, and I'm fine with that. In the end it's just a fanfic, it's for fun.

 

 

It was the happiest he had ever been.

 

The image of Verei's sad and angry face hovered up out of the sparkling void once in a while, haloed in stars and repeating the same words, but after a while it blended into the whole in a harmonious way, and he stopped hearing _“I'm leaving, Noro”_ in favor of a collection of euphonious syllables with no more ultimate meaning than the sound of a harp being plucked.

 

Once in a while the skooma would start to wear off, and he would be thirsty and cold, forced to acknowledge the grubby little cave and the dirty bed-roll and the pillow made of sack. A little while after that he would start to notice that he ached, and that his own greasy hair was falling into his eyes as he lay on his side. When that happened, he would have a drink from the bucket of water and get up to get another bottle of skooma from the wooden chest.

 

He wasn't sure how long this had gone on, but it was certain that the bucket was getting low. He would have to go up canal-side and get some fresh water before too long. Drinking the runoff swill from the canals down here in the Underworks would be suicide of a much faster and less pleasurable sort. He wasn't sure how he would manage the ladder in his current state. Best not to worry about it. The violet coprinus and luminous russula that populated the alcove opposite his bed-roll were pretty in the dark, and prettier through the bottom of a new bottle of skooma, blue and purple glow swimming and wavering and merging with each other in ever-changing patterns.

 

At some point there were soft footsteps. This was a little worrying. It was always possible someone was coming to steal his skooma. He roused himself sufficiently to roll onto his back and open his eyes, staring into the dark with pupils so big that the thin rim of red iris could hardly be seen against the red sclera. That was how he was able to notice the door opening and closing, and some strange stir of the air between it and himself, a weird little ripple that he appreciated as something of a new effect.

 

Someone was swearing. It wasn't him, because first, he wasn't a woman and second, he didn't speak Ta'agra.

 

“You saw her jump into the water,” a voice said, suddenly and disturbingly close to his ear, so that he grunted in surprise. “You remember that.” This time the language was Dunmeris, heavily accented but distinct.

 

The air rippled again, and the door shut. He heard a dragging noise from outside. It had to be loud. He was insulated from most stimuli that his own mind did not create. He heard the splash after it, too.

 

Nirn revolved for a while after that, and his mind wandered, as it was wont to do. After some time had passed someone knocked on his door, and then when he just stared at it blankly, they threw it open, then stopped, throwing up one arm over their face. The blue and purple glow made an especially nice effect on the ordinator's golden mask, he thought.

 

“B'vek, what a stink. You, did you see a Khajiit?”

 

“What?” His own voice tended to split the veil of illusion more than hers had. It was rough, disused. He couldn't smell himself. He couldn't smell anything at all, hadn't been able to for days or weeks.

 

“A Khajiit, you junkie s'wit, a suthay-raht in blue robes.”

 

He squinted, canvassing what he would have, for the sake of argument, to call his memory.

 

“She jumped into the water,” he said. “I thought she was here to steal my skooma.”

 

“Did she take anything? Potions?”

 

“Don't have any potions,” he said. “Except skooma. She didn't take that.”

 

“Yes, right, fine. What's your name, s'wit?”

 

Well, that one was easy. He hadn't managed to forget it yet.

 

“Noro Laend,” he said.

 

“All right. Well, we're watching you, scum. Stay out of trouble.”

 

“Yes, serjo,” he said, to the slamming door.

 

It was more peaceful for a while after that. He debated whether it was time to open another bottle, or just go to sleep and hope maybe this would be the last time he had to worry about it. He had just about decided on the second one when the door opened again, and the air rippled as it had before.

 

“Good, very good. Perhaps you will be useful to her after all,” said a voice, a sweet soprano that tended to roll a certain number of of consonants in Dunmeris.

 

“I doubt it,” he said frankly. “Are you invisible?”

 

“Mm, yes and no.” The door shut. “But that will run out very soon, so it is just as well that you remembered what she told you. She will have to be your guest for some little while yet, alas, so she may as well do something about the stench.”

 

“I don't smell anything,” he said.

 

“That is not surprising.” The voice lapsed into a droning whisper for a good few seconds, and he was about ready to nod off again when a cloud of blue sparkles filled the cave, brighter than daylight, and he shrank in on himself like a dying larval kwama, curled up in a tight ball. It followed him, imprinting the back of his eyelids with a pattern of stars and spheres. A powerful and uncomfortable tingling spread up and down his entire body. His hair felt different; the hang of his clothes felt different; his very teeth felt unsticky and smooth in a way he really did not even remember ever experiencing.

 

He heard himself whimper.

 

“It is not as bad as that,” said the voice, sounding tired now. “You will get used to it. Now scoot over. She has had to heal herself and unpoison herself and all manner of things today, and she will do something about the rest of it tomorrow.”

 

Entirely to his surprise, there was something warm at his back, and an arm thrown over his side just as if that were entirely natural and not a stranger crawling into his bed unsolicited. He could feel a small pair of breasts pressed against his spine, and a surface that felt very fuzzy and soft curled in against the back of his neck, blowing hot air down his shirt collar. He relaxed slightly. There was still enough skooma in his system to prevent him from staying tense for more than a few seconds at a time.

 

“You don't know me,” he said. “That's not safe.”

 

“Pah,” murmured the voice. “You are so flown away that you could not threaten a hatchling scrib. Lie still and be a warm thing, and maybe later she will solve all your problems.”

 

“I've already solved all my problems,” he said.

 

“Shh. Go to sleep.”

 

It was hard to argue with that. Besides, maybe he was just hallucinating. He had heard that sometimes you would get that, when it was close to the end, go from a warm and distorted viewing of reality to something completely apart from normal perception.

 

So in the end he shrugged, and let himself fall asleep. It was nice to feel warm. It had been a long time.

 

He dreamed less than usual, and woke up still feeling warm. Someone was yawning in his ear, breathing hot air across his face. He made some sort of interrogative noise.

 

“Yes, it is time to wake up, serjo. We should have a talk.”

 

He scooted away from the other body and sat up slowly, squinting against the inevitable headache. The skooma had mostly worn off. No more pretty halos, no more relaxed, indifferent feeling. Now he was sitting in a dark cave in the Underworks of St. Delyn on a worn bedroll that was much cleaner than he remembered, and there was a Khajiit in a blue robe sitting up next to him. It was probably still Sun's Dusk. There weren't really seasons in the Underworks, the heat and steam of Vivec maintaining roughly the same temperature year-round. Whatever might happen to a beggar down here, the winter wouldn't freeze them.

 

He turned to look at the Khajiit, still squinting. She was little, as Khajiit went, a small-boned creature, with the two long paws that no shoe would ever properly fit sticking out from under her lower hem. Her fur was a pale cream color streaked and spotted with dark brown, the same dark brown as the unruly mass of kinky hair on her head. She wore a lot of layers of different colors of cloth. Blue was a recurring theme in shades that sort of went together without really matching. Her ears were big enough to stick out the top of her hair. There were colorful beads threaded through her hair in places. They would probably be very pretty when he'd had some more skooma, rimmed by the blue and purple light of the mushrooms. Right now her yellow eyes glowed slightly in the dark as she looked at him, flicking an ear backward and forward.

 

“So,” he said, crabwalking backward far enough that they were no longer touching. “Who are you?”

 

“Khajiit is called Sahrid. And you are Noro Laend, unless that is a name you invented to lie to the ordinator. She does not think you are that clever.”

 

“I'm not,” he said, plunking back down on the cavern's dirt floor next to the wooden chest. He reached for the bucket first, to pour its remaining contents partly in his mouth and partly down his chin and shirt-front. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sahrid stretch her arms carefully, then roll up into a squat, twitching her tail around her calves.

 

He wiped his mouth, set the bucket down, and reached for the lid of the wooden box. He heard only a soft rustle. He was somewhat surprised to find a hand fastened around his wrist, pearly claws indenting his skin.

 

“Not yet,” said the Khajiit softly, into his ear. “We will talk first.”

 

He tried to shake her off, weakly. She hung on.

 

“Oh, come on.” He tried again, entirely without effect. He thought about giving her a shove. That seemed like something that would take effort. He was reminded that he hadn't eaten in at least a couple of days. Finally he sighed and sat back on his heels. “What do you want from me?”

 

“Better.” She slid past him to crouch between him and the box, pushing the heavy mass of hair back over her shoulders. “A place to hide, yes. For a couple of days, until Sahrid's powers are returned to her fully and she may escape this dreadful city. The men in the gold masks, they will not seek me again where they found only a bad smell, and not far off there is a daedric shrine where it is not safe even for ordinators to go.”

 

“I don't care if you stay or go,” he said. “Just use the other half of the cave. It's big enough.”

 

“Yes, that is true,” she said. “And when Sahrid has found something to sleep on, she will. Meanwhile, you will share your bedroll, you will wash regularly, and you will eat food. And when she goes, she will leave behind enough gold to buy you as much skooma as you could ever desire.” She curled her upper lip back over her teeth as she said the last one, ears lowering. Noro watched dispassionately.

 

“I've already got that much skooma,” he said. “I spent Verei's bride-price on it after she left. She didn't realize I'd saved it.”

 

“What a sad little story.”

 

“Move,” he said. Sahrid shook her head.

 

“First you will go get water while I go and get food. Then you may have your filthy drug.”

 

He tried to reach past her. She showed yellow fangs, snarling in his face. Noro looked at that for a moment, measuring the odds of getting to his skooma versus the probability of bites to his face. Then he took the bucket, got painfully to his feet, and called her a s'wit. She laughed in his face.

 

“Yes, Khajiit loves you, too. Go.”

 

He went, staggering out the cavern door into the cold, dank, stinking air of the sewers. The ladder wasn't far from his cavern. It shouldn't take so long as that. Behind him, he heard the cavern door open and shut, and a distinct and final click. He swore again under his breath, cursing mages and their way with locks.

 

The Underworks of St. Delyn looked much as it always did, little of it as he could see in the darkness. The walls were of a light tan clay, held together by its own weight, but probably also by the ambient magic that kept the city at a stable hover as much as by plaster. Moisture streaked the surface with rusty brown and gray. Every so often they would change the path of the water from above and sluice down the walls to wash away the worst of the dreck that got onto the walkways. They never gave notice. Sometimes people got washed away as well. It was why Noro had searched so hard for his little cave.

 

A broad walkway curved around the end of a canal lined with slick walkways and bridged with the same, thrice as tall as a Dunmer. Noro remembered a cocktail of horrible smells, everything that ever went down a drain in Vivec, whether it had partly or entirely passed through a living body or not. There were the familiar awful organic odors in all their stages of rot, but also the sharper reek of spent potions and acids from the smiths and all manner of chemical wastes. He could smell none of it now, his nostrils stunned by the drug.

 

Noro remembered the ladder being somewhere to his right, so he set off that way. His eyes were probably about as adjusted as they were going to get. The only light came from an occasional mushroom that hadn't been gathered by assiduous junk collectors hoping to sell them to the alchemists. He could tell where the, for lack of a better term, water was by the dull gleam, but it was as well to keep his eyes mostly on his feet. He'd stepped on a rat carcass once. That had been nasty, but stepping on anything alive would definitely be worse.

 

The ladder loomed up just before the walkway ended at a bridge. Across it he could just dimly see an armored body pacing to and fro. The light of a couple of weak candles in sconces gleaming on dirty blond hair and a braided beard, some Nord guarding the threshold of a door set into the wall. He wore yellow-brown bonemold with heavy pauldrons that made his shoulders twice as wide, and a steel axe was hung on his back. The door to the shrine Ihinipalit was not quite visible, just the edge of the rounded frame. The zeal of the Temple was not yet enough to overcome the sullen apathy of the Ordinators when it came to the sewer's daedric cultists. It would take a lot of Ordinators in one go to clean them out, probably with mercenary mages to support them, and no one had not yet chosen to spend the money. It was only St. Delyn, who cared? At least this way they had the daedric cult scum where they could easily find them.

 

The ladder itself was just a pole with some little rungs sticking off on either side, staggered as they went up. Noro squinted upward at the trapdoor, trying to gather his limited strength, and then he shoved the bucket handle over one arm and began the laborious climb up.

 

He was sweating by the time he succeeded in getting the rickety wooden trapdoor open, and then the shaft of light from above blinded him. He covered his eyes with one arm, swearing under his breath as he clambered out. The bucket clattered on the trapdoor as he slowly gained his feet, panting from even that much exertion.

 

The Canalworks were loud with the sound of falling water, brightly lit only compared to the sewer below. Water poured down from neat tunnels in the upper walls and into black-rimmed basins without even drains below, just grids of iron barely small enough not to admit an adult's foot. There were short, mildewy boards leaned up against the wall here and here, for mothers to stand their children on while they bathed them. This was St. Delyn's source of free public water for cooking, drinking and washing. It must have come from the lake below at some point, freshened and cleaned by magic within the bowels of the canton, but Noro had never cared how any of that worked.

 

There were women with baskets of laundry around many of the little waterfalls. Most were Dunmer with black or gray or occasionally red hair tied up in kerchiefs, their skirts or trousers bound up around their knees and their sleeves rolled up to their elbows, showing scarred and scrawny gray flesh. Some were toothless. Some were obviously fellow skooma addicts, vague-eyed and slow-moving, but still holding their lives together enough to be down here at work. Some were surrounded by their children, quiet, big-eyed, always watching and never playing down here.

 

People of various species in various states of undress stood under the water in other basins. There weren't enough people for lines to form at the moment. It must be late at night. The light in here came from a number of lanterns ranged around the walls, dim and smoking faintly, casting long shadows. Noro looked down unwillingly at himself, at his worn and mended brown tunic and the baggy tan trousers that were gone at both knees. They had been his work clothes, when he still worked. He didn't miss it. He had carried messages, he had rowed a gondola owned by somebody else, he had been a sweeper and a crude cobbler, all the menial things he could find or stomach.

 

Thinking about all of that made him crave skooma more than ever. Noro growled under his breath and went to stand under one of the outfalls with his clothes on. The water was lukewarm. It wasn't a bad feeling on his skin. After a minute he took off his shirt and his hobnailed boots and hung them on the basin rim, then his pants and his socks and his wrapped undergarment. He'd never have gotten fully clean in here if the Khajiit hadn't used whatever that damned spell was on him, but at least he could reasonably say he had done his best. Nobody stared at his skinny blue-gray body. Nobody cared down here.

 

His hair hung in damp strands around his shoulders when he had finished. He picked out a thread from his tunic hem to tie it back when he had wrung out his wet things and put them back on. Now he was cold. He was sullen as he filled the bucket with water and made his way carefully back down the ladder. He didn't want to slip with his damp soles, and he didn't want to drop the water and have to go back.

 

Noro was glad enough to shut the trapdoor above him and creep back down into the dark, where he belonged and nobody could see him. As his eyes adjusted he noticed the Nord from the shrine staring at him. He turned away and went quickly off toward his little cave, not making eye contact.

 

The door was still locked. He had to stand in front of it for a good fifteen minutes – sober, the floor was too foul to sit on – and wait for the Khajiit to come back. She dissolved into visibility a few feet away with a big wax paper packet under one arm and waved a hand airily. The door clicked, and Noro took the bucket back in and set it back in the little indentation it had made in the dirt. He turned to see Sahrid sitting on the chest that held the skooma.

 

“Come on,” he protested.

 

“Food,” she insisted, unwrapping the paper packet with eager claws. It held bread, dried fish, and what must be a cheap and flavorless scuttle, an unappetizing gray wedge of it. She divided it neatly in half into the outer and inner wraps and handed him the outer one. “Sit. Eat all of it. Then he may have skooma.”

 

“Why do you care?” he demanded, reluctantly sitting down crosslegged on the bedroll.

 

“Khajiit wants you alive until she is ready to leave,” Sahrid informed him, and tore off another piece of fish to eat, eyes narrowing in pleasure at the taste. It tasted like a wad of canvas to Noro, but it felt good going down. His stomach was apparently not as indifferent as he had thought. “In case the Ordinators come back, she can hide and they will find only you, seemingly trying to clean up your life like a good and pious citizen of Vivec. Besides, if you are dead you will smell even worse than you did before.”

 

He grunted. He couldn't really argue with that. “How long are you going to stay?”

 

“Two, maybe three days,” she said. “By then they will have stopped looking and she can probably get away just covering her hair and walking out to the gondola. Do you not want to know what she has done?”

 

“Why should I care?” Noro said.

 

“Sahrid is glad you asked that, my surly friend.” Her mood seemed to improve with food. He watched her pick up the bucket to drink, then lick a few drops from her cream-colored muzzle. “She sneaked into the Library of Vivec and she borrowed a book, yes. Learned a new spell that is supposed to be big secret, known only to Temple worthies. She may have a little vial of useful contents as well.”

 

“You sound awfully proud of yourself,” he said. He was eating more slowly, without much interest. “Especially since you obviously got caught.”

 

“Bah. It takes a long time to learn a spell from a book, even for an expert magister such as Ko'sahrid! Stupid skooma-head like Noro Laend would not know. She had to stay two nights chameleon in the library and the magicka ran out, yes. She was seen with the book in hand and had to drop it and flee. She was shot with arrows and darts and would have died if her own prowess with magicka had not saved her! But still, she lives, and she knows the spell.” Sahrid paused to lick a glob of scuttle from a claw, eyeing him expectantly.

 

“You want me to ask what spell it is?” he guessed.

 

“No, it is very secret,” she said smugly. “Perhaps later he will see it. Drink water.”

 

“Suit yourself,” Noro grunted, and had a drink from the bucket. He started to wad up the paper to toss in a corner, but Sahrid plucked it from his grasp and folded it up with the other one. She scooted off the chest and into a squatting position again. With one hand she stuck the folded papers into the chest as she pulled out a green glass bottle with the other. Noro watched the bottle with very close attention until she handed it to him. He sat back on the bedroll and drank. The headache vanished as if by magic. He sighed, feeling the lines around his eyes and mouth relax. He could have the rest of it slowly. There was no hurry now that he had it in his hand.

 

“Scoot over,” Sahrid was saying, her voice pleasantly harmonious as it echoed back and forth through his head. He scooted, free from animosity now, eyes unfocused as he stared at the mushrooms across the cavern.

 

Nirn revolved for a while. Sometimes Sahrid spoke to him, but he did not at first remember much of what she said. Sometimes he said something back if it seemed like she wanted an answer. She seemed fond of the sound of her own voice. Eventually he slept.

 

When he woke again his head hurt, and there was something heavy on his chest, moving with each breath. He raised his head slightly and his chin ran into a head of kinky hair. Sahrid was using him as a pillow.

 

“I don't even know you, woman,” he said, squinting. She stirred and yawned hugely, showing a lot of prickly little teeth, and sat up beside him.

 

“Much nicer he is when he is high, yes.”

 

“Always,” Noro said glumly.

 

“Mm. Well, too bad. No more skooma for you until food. She gives you money and you go get this time, yes.”

 

“What!” Noro was indignant. “I'll have to walk all the way up to the waistworks!”

 

“Exercise will do Noro good, yes. Get the blood moving around and unpoisoning itself a little. Besides, if anyone sees him it will enhance the story that he is trying to improve himself. If anybody asks he may say he begged it off someone. He obviously does not have too much dignity for that.”

 

“I hate you,” he said, without much energy.

 

“Sahrid knows,” she said. He felt too feeble to try to slap the grin off her toothy face. He just glowered at her instead.

 

“Here is ten drakes. Shoo shoo.”

 

Ten drakes was only enough for half a bottle, but it would buy a lot of food. She knew what she was doing. Resentment burned in Noro's breast as he stomped back out to the ladder. He shot an irritated glance over at the shrine, where there was some Dunmer woman in steel now, still helmetless. She had a longsword at her hip and she was staring at him, red-on-red eyes wide and blank. He made an obscene gesture at her as he finished his climb, made reckless by his anger at Sahrid.

 

He had to pause several times on his way up the long stairway to the waistworks. By the time he made it all the way back down with a small burlap sack full of scuttle, bread, and a couple of roast kwama eggs he felt ready to collapse. He stumbled back into the little cave and slammed the door behind him. The Khajiit was already there, sitting on his skooma box drinking from the bucket. She looked up, licking her lips. He threw the bag at her. It plopped down at her feet instead.

 

“Good elf,” she said, and pulled it up onto her lap to look inside. “Mmmm, kwama egg. Is good amount of food for money, also. Here, one is for you.”

 

“I'm not hungry.”

 

“Yes you are, and until you eat she gives you no skooma.”

 

He swore viciously and at some length in Dunmeris with some Cyrodilic words thrown in. The Khajiit listened patiently, one ear occasionally flicking back and forward at a particularly pungent phrase. Finally he ran out of breath and sat panting on the bedroll, staring at her with all the venom in his soul.

 

“Dunmer knows some interesting words that are new to her,” she said cheerfully. “Here is egg. Eat.”

 

Defeated, Noro accepted it sullenly and bit the top of the shell to crack it. He even meekly dropped the top of the shell back into the bag when she held it out. He was only able to eat half of the three-pound egg before his stomach felt uncomfortably full. The Khajiit ate all of hers. Gods knew where she was putting it all. She accepted the half-egg back from him and stuck it back in with the remaining food, then shifted into a squat to get a bottle from the box and hand it to him.

 

“Here. Deal is deal, yes.”

 

He took it eagerly and drank. The high seemed less potent this time, a disappointing and short-lived burst of auras and a milder and briefer bliss. It wasn't surprising he'd developed a tolerance, but he felt anxious, desperate to get it back. One glance at the smug bitch over there picking her teeth with her index claw told him his pleas for more would not be answered. He rolled over angrily to face the wall. He was sure he would never sleep now, but he was tired enough from the long walk that eventually he did anyway.

 

Another headache, another trip up for water and a wash, another bottle of skooma. Another day passed. He grew to hate the Khajiit less as he grew more resigned to her presence. She wouldn't be there that much longer. He could wait. The headaches seemed to get more frequent and more intense even though she finally yielded to his demands for a second bottle. By the morning of the third day he couldn't get up, curled up shivering and sweating on the bedroll. The Khajiit laid a hand on his forehead, and he was too weak to push it away.

 

“Noro is sick,” she said.

 

“Thirsty,” he said.

 

“Water. No skooma for one who has fever.” She fetched a bottle which did indeed contain water, only the faintest taste of skooma indicating it had been refilled. He was too miserable to draw the obvious conclusion at that moment. He just drank and lay down again.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Noro drifted in and out of a miserable haze for an amount of time that seemed eternal. His body ached, all of it, head to toe. Sometimes his belly cramped unbearably, leaving him curled up and whimpering in agony. Periodically the Khajiit appeared hovering above him to make him drink, and once to try and feed him, though he could not choke down more than a few mouthfuls. Suddenly the taste of kwama egg, scrib jelly, plain bread was terrifyingly intense, painful to his senses. More and more he was aware of the smell of his own sweating body, the fabric of the bedroll close to his nose, the earthy walls and floor of the cave, the damp fungal smell of the mushrooms, and when Sahrid's hand was on his face, the warm stuffy smell of fur.

 

Verei's face seemed to chase him through the pain. _Noro, I can't do this one more time. You have to go. Please go._ He tossed and turned to get away from it. He must've said something about it at some point, because there was a leathery palm resting against his forehead, a voice in his ear:

 

“Sh, sh. She is not here, Noro. Nobody is angry.”

 

Eventually he knew himself again. He lay on his side, shivering, as his eyes focused on a meaningless purplish surface – fabric. Sahrid was on her knees in front of him, hand resting on his shoulder. Had she cast some spell on him? He felt that the pain was less than it had been a moment before. At some point she'd had time to go buy a second sack bedroll, cheap and ugly as his own.

 

“You're still here,” he said.

 

“Ordinators now patrol the Underworks at times that she cannot predict. She waits her opportunity,” Sahrid said. “Sit up.” She eased her hand under his shoulders and helped him. He felt weak as a new-hatched kwama, and he could smell himself. It was not pleasant.

 

“Can't ever keep your hands to yourself,” he said harshly.

 

“Mostly not. Here, drink soup.” She held a fat cup up to his lips that held something that smelled wonderfully of scuttle and guar meat, and when he drank it the taste was astonishingly powerful. He blinked as he drank it, swallowing as fast as he could. She took it away when it was about half gone. There was a ceramic pot on the floor beside her with a lid, steaming faintly.

 

“Easy. Let his stomach settle. He has not eaten in two days.”

 

“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

 

“Drink more soup,” she said imperturbably. “Sahrid has found a way for Noro to repay her kindness, don't worry.”

 

He grunted sullenly, but drank anyway. Afterward she gave him a bottle. It tasted like.... just water.

 

He looked at it and at her and back at the bottle in his hand. Before all this happened he remembered...

 

“You diluted my skooma,” he said. “You cut it with water until I got sick.”

 

“Yes,” Sahrid said. Noro lunged at her throat with both hands. She moved gracefully aside. He smacked face-into the floor, hitting his chin in the dirt before his hands could catch himself. He lay there for a second, growling inarticulately. “She did you a favor, stupid. Now you are not addicted any more.”

 

“Now I have no _life,”_ Noro said. “Why do you think I was down here with an entire box of skooma, you smug snaggle-toothed bitch?”

 

“Because the stinky Dunmer has nothing at all to lose. So why not help Sahrid, while you are being not dead yet?” she asked reasonably.

 

“Because I loathe you?”

 

“How very sentimental. Go see if he can make it up ladder to have a wash, think it over.”

 

Noro staggered to his feet, swaying, then worked his way gradually over to the door. His stomach lurched, but the soup stayed down.

 

He honestly thought he was going to fall off the ladder on his way up. He had to rest at almost every rung. There was somebody over at the shrine, but he couldn't spare the energy to see if it was the Nord or the Dunmer or somebody else today. Finally he rolled out onto the damp, chilly floor of the Canalworks and lay there panting for some seconds before he could manage to shut the trapdoor, stagger upright, and go... Get in line. It was apparently morning. There were queues of people at every waterfall. They had divided themselves by some silent agreement into lines of men at one side of the long hall and women at the other. He went to get in line behind a fat-bellied mer with sturdy, muscular shoulders, some workman who probably spent his days carrying goods up and down the stairs between the upper and lower waistworks above, where the shops were.

 

Plodding through the line gave him time to think. He hadn't tried to do that for a while, and it was not something he particularly enjoyed now.

 

He could go back to work pushing a broom or carrying dustbins or scrubbing the drains in the nicer levels. Make enough to bunk up in some shitty apartment with five other mer until he could fail to get an apprenticeship somewhere again, or until he could afford enough skooma to finish what he'd started, or until he got tired of it and dove in the lake to be eaten by the slaughterfish. He could scrounge around until he collected enough gold to get on the strider and go try again in some other town where opportunities were fewer and probably worse. Vivec was huge. There was always somebody who needed something carried or cleaned.

 

He could do whatever it was the stupid asshole mage wanted and maybe get killed or thrown in jail. None of his options looked particularly good. At least whatever Sahrid was planning was a new kind of awful. Who cared. He didn't feel like looking for work.

 

Eventually he was back downstairs, sitting on the suspiciously clean bedroll next to Sahrid. She must've used that spell he'd seen the first day while he was gone. She looked tired, yellow eyes slitted half-shut as she sat on the second length of canvas with her knees up under her skirts and her elbows leaning on them, ears a little lower than their customary annoyingly cheerful height.

 

“Well?” he said. “What is it you want?”

 

“Today we rest,” she said. “Tomorrow we talk about Ihinipalit.”

 

“What – the shrine? Are you crazy?” He stared at her. “You're not a Sheogorite or you'd be staying over there, wouldn't you?”

 

“She certainly is not,” sniffed Sahrid. “No, she plans to do a public service. And Noro will help.”

 

“How exactly do you think I can help?” he asked sourly, leaning back on his hands. “I'm not a fighter. I've never even picked up a weapon except during a bar fight, and that's only happened... let's see. Three times.”

 

“Fights or weapons?” she asked.

 

“Two chairs and a bottle. I've... been in more fights than that.” It had been another source of Verei's ongoing grievances that had both been entirely valid and no more within his control than the skooma was. They were not unrelated. “But usually I got my ass kicked. It's not like I've ever been trained for anything.”

 

“Hm. Well, it is not perfect, but she will make it work, never you mind,” she said firmly. “You will see the might of Ko'sahrid, yes indeed. For now, we eat soup and get lots of sleep. Shh.”

 

Sahrid ate a little but slept a lot, curled up in a tight ball on her own bedroll, head tucked down and hands pulled in and big feet pulled up under the hem of her skirts so that hardly any fur even showed. Noro ate as much as he could stand and sat or stood or walked slowly around, as much as he had energy for. It wasn't much. Sometimes he just sat and stared at the sleeping Khajiit. He was too tired to do much thinking. Eventually he slept.

 

For once he woke up before she did. He squinted his eyes open and found he felt cold for the first time in many days. He sat up slowly, rubbing his own arms. Sahrid was over on the other bedroll, was what. She was obnoxious, but she'd been warm. She was still curled up, but now her head was on the pillow, eyes squeezed tight shut in the dim light of the mushrooms, wet black nostrils moving slightly as she breathed. Her tail was curled over her own hip, not tufted like some Khajiit but slightly wider and thicker at the tip. No doubt some other Khajiit would find her fetching. Noro felt mildly annoyed. He got up, stretching, and stepped over her to go get a drink of water. It tasted infuriatingly of long-gone skooma. He went back over and kicked one of her legs.

 

“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”

 

“Mnurph,” she said groggily, and rolled onto her back to squint up at him. “Is morning?”

 

“Don't know, but I'm awake, so as far as I'm concerned yes. Let's get this thing over with.”

 

“Ah!” she brightened with annoying quickness, sitting up and reaching for the remains of the cold soup. “Very well. Today we conquer Inihipalit. Her surly friend Noro will be strong and heroic and slay many foes, yes.”

 

“That's insane,” he said, looking down at her with a hand on his hip.

 

“Ah, but he will see, yes. Soup?”  
  
“I'm not hungry,” he said.

 

He watched her warily as she bustled about finishing the soup, getting a drink, adjusting her kerchief; then she opened the door and chucked the empty crock into the sludge in the canal.

 

“All right. Let us start just outside, for the guard will see us before we cross the bridge. She will cast some spells on Noro, and he will go and defend himself from the crazy cultist, and then we will go inside and see to the others.”

 

“What? I'll be killed instantly,” Noro said, glaring at her as he followed her outside. “Even from here I can see he's wearing bonemold armor!” It was that same Nord again, with his steel axe gleaming dully in the dim light from the lanterns beside the door. “If you think I'm going anywhere near that door you're - ”

 

As the tirade began, Sahrid patted him on the arm as if to reassure him; he jerked his arm away, but not fast enough. Something green and faintly luminescent passed from her hand to his, sinking into his flesh, and he trailed off slowly as he lost his train of thought. He felt odd just for a second, as if the world had flipped over somehow.

 

“Now, she is sorry to be the one to tell Noro this,” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder. This time the faint glow was blue. He couldn't tell that it did anything, then or the next two times, but the air around him felt faintly electric, charged with magicka. “But she did not get rid of all of his skooma. Some of it was stolen. They took it away to Ihinipalit to use in the worship of their god. Probably a lot of it is still over there.”

 

“What? There's still skooma left?” He turned to stare over at the shrine. “But - ”

 

“Just look at that Nord,” she whispered in his ear. The green glow pulsed between them again, and suddenly he felt his heart beat faster, a hot red feeling in his head that he had not felt in months. “He looks like he's had some of it himself. He might even still be carrying it, the fetcher.”

 

Noro clenched his fists, his focus narrowing to the bulky figure of the Nord. “He stole my skooma, the s'wit. I'll get it back!”

 

“That's right. You get it back,” purred Sahrid, as Noro started across the bridge at a run. In that moment he didn't care that he was unarmored, unarmed, wearing sandals that could easily slip and pitch him into the sewage. He did not feel his disused muscles protest. He was furious with an incandescent and uncontrollable rage and it buoyed him above all other things.

 

“Give it back!” Noro screamed, his voice echoing harshly up and down the tunnel. The Nord turned to stare at him in disbelief and started to draw his axe, but he was too slow. In fact, he seemed to be moving through scrib jelly as Noro charged him, his mouth only starting to open in question or protest when Noro's fist hit him in the nose.

 

His face crumpled like paper under the Dunmer's fist, blood spraying as his nose was crushed to pulp and splinters. Noro hardly felt the pain in his knuckles as he skidded to a halt, grabbing at the Nord's shoulder to try and free his hand. The man was already dead, axe falling as he twitched and shuddered. His face was completely concave, brain pierced by bits of bone and cartilage. Noro let him fall, then kicked him a couple of times for good measure, but he could see that there was nowhere for the man to be carrying skooma. His belt pouch was small and full-looking.

 

“I know you're hiding it in there!” Noro shouted at the door, and kicked it. It burst inward as if hit by a battering ram. He probably should have wondered why that happened, but he was already charging in, the axe forgotten on the ground outside. Inside he paused, chest heaving as his eyes adjusted. A pair of fat crimson candles on the broad round dais of the altar cast a dim circle of light around them. He stood in the midst of four pillars that vanished up into darkness – the roof must be nearly at the floor to the Waistworks, somehow carved out of the middle of the canal-side level without anyone noticing. Falls of water poured from grates in the walls into drains in the floors on either side, fresh-scented, a soft dull roar. A scaffold rose from either of the walls to right and left to support the distant roof. And in front of him rose a statue worked in dull gray stone, an image of a nattily dressed human in a vest and trousers in the Imperial style, so high that the head was in darkness high above.

 

A mer was just getting up from in front of the altar, moving so slowly that it was marvelous he could stand under the weight of his steel armor. He was short, pale-skinned, long-eared, and his tail of hair was blond, a Bosmer. He was shouting something, his face sour and wrinkled and hideous, as he reached for the tanto at his hip. The words were so slow and protracted that Noro could not understand them at all.

 

“GIVE IT BACK!” Noro shrieked, and plunged forward, fists upraised. He grabbed at the Bosmer's sword arm just as it grasped the hilt, jerking his face forward into the other man's as he grabbed at the edge of his pauldron. Skull met skull with a loud _clonk,_ and the other staggered back, mouth and eyes wide open. He tripped on the edge of the altar and started to go crashing down, and at that point Noro jerked the sword from his scabbard – child's play to pull it from his armored grasp, the easiest thing in the world – and hacked violently and inexpertly at his throat. Blood sprayed in Noro's face, on his clothes, but his lust for it was not sated and there was no skooma, only a gaping dead man sprawled over the dais with one boot jerking. Still no skooma! Noro whirled, the tanto clutched in his unskilled left hand, the knuckles of his right cut to the bone and dripping on the clay floor.

 

A tall, thin woman with brown hair was just coming around the edge of the statue, hand upraised. Her yellow silk robe was slightly dirty, but it had clearly been expensive, the brown panels of her over-vest richly embroidered. He started for her, breath rasping in his throat, and then a jet of something sprayed from her hand and enveloped him in a green mist that stank of the acrid and the chemical. He choked on it, gasping, and flailed madly with the blade at the smoke. He was aware that he was shaking, that pain was playing over every nerve in his body like lightning through a dead tree, but it didn't stop him. He burst from the cloud of poison to see the woman standing wide-eyed, finger still outstretched. Noro chopped at her hand without skill but with incredible speed and saw it come away at the wrist as if she had been made out of scuttle, spurting blood, more blood, always blood. She barely had time to stagger backward, mouth a startled O, before he had a handful of her robe in his hand and had begun stabbing her in the chest over and over and over and over and -

 

Something hit him in the back, tingly and cold. He jerked upright, dropping the woman; she fell like a broken doll, limbs all sprawled out, face still wide-eyed in surprise, but there wasn't time to worry about that because now he faced a big bald human in dull netch armor with a steel axe in his hands. And all of a sudden he felt heavy, incredibly heavy, as though he were being dragged down to the center of the earth. It was all he could do to raise his hands at all as the man charged toward him, raising the axe -

 

And tripped on nothing and fell on his face. Noro gaped down at him, then raised a foot to stamp on his head, but the Nord rolled aside, swinging the axe half-blindly at the Dunmer's leg. It gashed his shin and staggered him, and then he fell to one knee and couldn't get up again. He flung the tanto carelessly at the Nord and saw it embed to the hilt in his belly, unbelievable force from his weak, exhausted arm. The man grunted in surprise, staring down at it, then scrambled to his feet and stepped forward, swinging the axe over his head to bring it down on Noro's skull.

 

Noro raised both arms – it was hard, so hard – and caught at the shaft of the weapon. To move against his own suddenly tremendous weight was difficult, but the weight of the axe seemed to add nothing at all. That was odd. Noro wondered about it as he yanked the shaft to the side and downward, bringing the Nord with it. The big human hit his knees and then lashed out with a kick, but Noro held on, and the axe came with him as he was knocked back. Something hot was dribbling down his face, from his nose and the corners of his eyes, and it tasted metallic and awful where it ran into his mouth. He wondered about that dimly as the Nord loomed over him, and then he shoved the axe upward and saw it slice into the Nord's cheek.

 

The feeling of heaviness left him very suddenly. Noro hacked and hacked and hacked at the Nord, sometimes missing, sometimes hitting, paying no attention to the burst of green magicka from the man's hands or the subsequent feeling of being very... very... tired...

 

At last he realized he was lying on his side, jerking the axe in a short arc in front of him at the ruin of the Nord's face. Everything hurt. Things hurt that he had been unaware that he had, tucked up in their secret places in his chest and gut, writhing inside him as if he was full of snakes. His ears rang so loudly that he couldn't hear the water.

 

He rolled onto his back, coughing. There was that awful taste again. A face loomed into his field of view, the grinning smug face of a tawny speckled Khajiit surrounded by a cloud of kinky brown hair.

 

“You see, Noro?” Sahrid said cheerfully. “She knew you could do it.”

 

Her voice echoed from somewhere a long way off, and then the darkness closed in and Noro knew nothing at all.

 

He was aware of sound first, the soft static voice of many waters. Then he shifted position and realized he was lying down, barefoot, wearing nothing but the wrap around his loins. Something light and warm lay over him. Noro squinted his eyes open, not on the black dirt ceiling of his cave, but a clay ceiling lit dimly in red. He pushed up on his elbows, then hissed between his teeth as he felt suddenly dizzy, flopping back onto his back. He lay under a red woolen coverlet in a bed big enough to hold two people. His brief glimpse had shown him that the room had a normal ceiling, and a large wooden wardrobe across from a broad doorless entry. There were very fine colorful rugs on the floor beneath the red paper lanterns, and tapestries hung on the clay walls, though their purple and yellow patterns were mildly disturbing if you looked for more than a second. Across the room was a table with scattered things on it, another red lantern, and an ovoid planter full of purple-black anther flowers and long narrow draggle-tails with the soft oblong puffs on the ends glowing blue-green.

 

A tawny Khajiit in an extremely fine blue velvet robe sat shearing her hair with a pair of sharp scissors as she perched on the end of his bed.

 

“Sahrid,” he croaked. His throat felt dry and disused.

 

He could just about turn his head far enough to see the broad arch that served the room for a doorway, and through it the gray trouser legs of a giant statue. There were no bodies, just a couple of faded smears on the clay floor.

 

“Ah, Noro Laend, my useful friend.” She dropped the scissors into the basket, running her hands over her now short head of wooly brown hair. She got up and came to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. “She is very proud of you. Unarmed, you have slain four people, three of them magi. Not magi as good as Ko'sahrid, of course.” She looked at the pearly tips of her claws. They were perfectly clean. Noro realized that he must be as well; he felt no dried blood crusting his face, no sweat on his body, and he could smell only clean fabric and the slightly dank smells of clay and stone.

 

“What's wrong with me?” he asked.

 

“He was badly poisoned, and he nearly died before she could cure him, yes. Do not worry, he will be fine with a little rest,” she said soothingly.

 

Noro turned his head, shutting his eyes against another wave of dizziness, then opened them to look at his right hand. There were new scars across his knuckles, but he could open and close it without pain.

 

“Wait,” he said slowly. “We were out on the walkway and... you said attack the Nord, and I said no, and – you - ” She had cast some spell, some spell with a faint green light, and he had believed everything she said, and the next one had made him so crazed with fury that he was afraid of nothing at all and ready to kill anything in front of him. A dull, burning anger churned in his gut as he realized how easily she had used him, and with what little reluctance. “You made me do that,” he growled. “You used magicka on my mind.”

 

“Well, yes, of course,” Sahrid said reasonably. “Noro is a lazy coward. He wasn't going to run in and attack daedric cultists without a little AWK.” Her words cut off in a squawk as he suddenly lunged upright in bed and seized her robe in one hand and her throat in the other. His muscles trembled at even that much effort, and the room tilted violently around him, but he hung grimly on even as she clawed at his wrist. He ignored the pain.

 

“Listen to me closely, s'wit,” he said, very quietly, staring into the wide yellow eyes. Her ears were flat to the top of her head, lips peeled back from her sharp teeth. “I know you made me strong and fast and that's why I'm alive right now. I know you healed me, or I'd be dead from poison. But if you ever tamper with my mind again, you had better plan never to sleep, because I will smash your smug damned face and watch you die. Do you understand?”

 

“Hhhkk,” she gasped, and kicked him in the stomach. Noro doubled over, dry-heaving, and she rolled away onto the ornate red and blue rug with a rustle of fabric. She came up into a squat that was much at odds with her fancy new robe. Her tail lashed behind her as she rubbed at her own throat, ears still flat. She spat something in Ta'agra. Noro rolled onto his side so that he could see her, panting, tasting bile in his mouth. He hung his scratched and bloody right wrist out over the side in case it should drip.

 

“Didn't hear that,” he gasped.

 

“She understands,” snapped Sahrid. “He could be a little grateful. She already pushed the bodies into the sewer, which was annoying hard work, and now he has his pick of nice clothes to wear and weapons and - ”

 

“You talk too much,” Noro said, eyes squinted half-shut in dizziness and exhaustion.

 

“He can only push so far,” she warned, straightening gracefully and stalking over to lean in the doorway of the main room. Out there the door was back on its hinges, showing no glimpse of the sewer channel outside. He must not have broken it too badly.

 

“Go fuck yourself. You're out of power, or you'd have flattened me the second I grabbed you,” Noro said.

 

“She is not out of power,” Sahrid said, but with less heat.

 

“Then you don't have enough to cast your little green mind-control thing.”

 

“Charm,” she hissed over her shoulder, and turned to stare back out into the room, arms folded. Her tail just twitched now, the tip jerking back and forth every so often.

 

“Your charm,” he said. “But I'm right.”

 

“She could fry him with lightning, or set him on fire, or - ”

 

“You can't, or you'd have done that to the Ordinators. You don't,” he paused to breathe, watching black spots hover at the corners of his vision. “You don't have a single spell that can do actual, physical harm. Do you?”

 

“He has no idea what he is talking about. To learn even one spell can take years. To master spells from two different schools is the work of a lifetime,” she said irritably, waving a claw. Her tail had stopped swinging, however.

 

“You're right. I don't know a thing about it,” he said weakly. After a moment he shut his eyes, letting his right arm hang limply out over the side of the bed as he lay on his side. His eyelids felt too heavy to stay open. A moment after that he heard soft footsteps returning to the bed.

 

“She could smother him with a pillow and find some other worthless lost mer to do her bidding,” said a voice from quite nearby. She must be crouching beside the bed, nearly at his eye level. He felt warmth on his face as she breathed.

 

“You could,” he slurred, without opening his eyes. “But y'won't. Next one may not... warn you first...”

 

There was a defeated sigh. A leathery palm came to rest on his neck, and he felt the warm tingle of magicka pulse through his throat, his head, his body. The pain cleared. The fatigue remained.

 

“Now she is exhausted. She hopes he is happy.” She did not sound at all contrite, but she did sound resigned.

 

“Dunno. Never found out what that's like,” Noro murmured. He couldn't care about any of it now. He just felt very tired, muscles relaxing whether he would or no as he sank into the mattress. The dark behind his eyes gave way to a deeper, greater dark, and he slept.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Noro woke with a strangely familiar warm, fuzzy sensation on the back of his neck. He was lying on his side, and slitting his eyes open showed him the same table in the same dim-lit room with its peculiar tapestries and the sound of falling water. Moving slightly provided the information that yes indeed, Sahrid had gone to sleep behind him with her arm over his waist again, face tucked down against his neck.

  


“Seriously?” he said aloud. Nothing hurt. His head felt as clear as it ever had. The Khajiit stirred behind him, tickling the small hairs on his back as she exhaled. “I DID threaten to murder you.”

  


“Yes, that is true,” grunted Sahrid, and yawned hugely, fangs brushing his hair. She let go of him and sat up, squinting, one ear down and one up. She was still wearing the blue velvet robes of yesterday. “But it was cold, and there was only the one bed. What was she to do?”

  


Noro rolled onto his back and sat up as well. “Take your new clothes and haircut and sneak out of the city without anyone noticing you?”

  


“Ah, but she has far to go, and then she would have no bodyguard. Noro Laend may yet be of use to her.”

  


“ _B'vek, nes han'sva s'wit_ ,” he shot back.

  


She just laughed at him. The air was cold against his skin as he eased out from under the covers and stumbled out into the main room. The water from one of the four little infalls smelled clean enough, so he splashed it on his face and hands to wake himself up, then stuck his head under it and drank. It tasted like Canalworks water, all right. Gods only knew how they'd ever succeeded in diverting water down into the shrine without anyone noticing. Maybe the space had originally been left for some other purpose. A glittering something caught his eye, as he straightened up, and he turned to see a small pewter plate placed between the statue's feet, something he had been in no condition to notice yesterday (if it WAS yesterday). On it lay two diamonds and an emerald. Noro stared. Why in the world would Sahrid leave something that valuable out here? She had to know he would pocket them as soon as he saw them.

  


_It's some kind of trick. She did it to see what I would do, the little bitch. Well I won't touch them. Serve her right._

  


He came back into the smaller room, more steady on his feet, and found Sahrid sitting on the edge of the neatly-made bed gnawing on what looked to him like a leek. He went over to look into the wardrobe. A faint smell of musk and wood drifted out, some scent so expensive he had never been near it before. Either the cultists had cared a great deal about their clothes, or they'd been robbing people and stashing their things in here. He counted ten pairs of shoes of all different sizes.

  


“What if I don't want to be of use?” he asked, as he shook out a tunic to look at it.

  


“Then he is welcome to take what he likes and go. She is sure he will pawn it all for skooma and be broke and disgusting again in a couple of days,” Sahrid said, patting her short, kinky hair. She had slept with her robe on even in the bed, layers of fabric between them. “Which is a pity, but it will not be Sahrid's problem.”

  


“You think you're so smart,” he grunted, pulling out one of the less ornate woolen s – it was dark blue - and some trousers of rough black silk. She was as indifferent to his near-nakedness as she had been when he was clothed, glancing at him without any particular interest as she rolled out of bed.

  


“But yes,” she agreed without hesitation, cracking her knuckles as she stretched out her arms. “There's food in a box over there, if he is hungry. Some of the bread is very stale, but none of it has really gone off yet.”

  


Noro's stomach informed him that he was very hungry indeed. He found a pair of leather shoes that were only a little big – he could make them fit by wearing two pairs of the stockings he found – and went over to look in the chest by the table as Sahrid went out into the main room to the water. He had no urge whatsoever to go see what she looked like without her clothes on. He'd as soon ogle a clannfear. Instead he busied himself combing out the knots in his hair and tying it back with a bit of black ribbon.

  


He was sitting in a chair gnawing some scuttle when she came back. It had gone stiff and very sharp.

  


“He did not meddle with the shrine offerings,” she said.

  


“I figured they were a trap,” he said.

  


“Mm, indeed they are,” Sahrid said, coming over to rummage in the wardrobe, tossing things onto the bed as she spoke. “At every daedric altar in Vvardenfell there is one gem that is cursed, yes, but nobody knows which one except the priest that cursed it, and if you touch the accursed one it summons into this world a dremora lord of great power to defend the offerings. Which might not be an inconvenience to Ko'sahrid, but it certainly would be to Noro Laend.”

  


“I hate you,” he said wearily, and had a drink of water from the pitcher on the table. It tasted like water, but at least it did not have the tormenting aftertaste of skooma. With a full stomach he felt slightly more ready to face the Khajiit and all of her nonsense.

  


“That's the spirit,” she said happily. She pulled out a dull brown robe and held it up to the lantern light, then dug around and found a small box with a padded lid. Finally she pulled out a blue-gray robe and added that to the other, draped over her arm. “Today there shall be a great escape, and then Sahrid and her new bodyguard -”

  


“Your new toy, you mean.”

  


“Ahem.” She waited for him to stop talking, then continued as if he had not spoken. “Sahrid and her new bodyguard will go to seek the ruin of Lanozhakiri to the East of Vivec and West of Molag Mar.”

  


“You could just as easily cast those spells on yourself,” he said. “And you have sharp claws and teeth, which I don't. You don't really need me at all.”

  


“He thinks too little of himself, yes yes. Wait and see,” she said. She took robe and box and went to sit on the bed. “She will make him into something great and powerful and everyone will be impressed.”

  


Noro grunted. “What is it you're doing, exactly?”

  


“Making a couple of bags for carrying things in. She went into the great Library with only the clothes on her back and her tiny purse, and that is what she came out with. Now we have things to bring with us, and she is broke.” As she spoke she was threading a needle from the box with a strand of black thread, squinting one eye shut. “We need to carry out whatever we can sell and get rid of as much of it as we can before we leave the town, yes.”

  


“I can sew a seam,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I'd rather that than just sit here watching you.”

  


“Very good, the sewing kit has several needles in it. Here.” She brought him the blue-gray robe, the needle and a spool of white thread and set them all on the table. “Sew shut the bottom hem, cut off the sleeves, and fold the top down inside to make the purse lining. Then make a flap and straps from the sleeves.” She showed him how she wanted them folded as she spoke, staying a respectful distance from the reach of his hands. That lifted his mood slightly as he set about the very mundane task of sewing. Sahrid seemed to be setting about it with more enthusiasm than skill. Her stitches were large and careless.

  


“You must've grown up rich,” he said, glancing up briefly.

  


“But yes, long ago her family was wealthy. Why does he say so?”

  


“You haven't had to do much sewing,” he said.

  


“Indeed she has not,” Sahrid said. “But she learns new things all of the time, yes.” Even this was a matter for congratulating herself. Noro was not surprised. “Fortunately she has Noro Laend, who is a dab hand to the needle, yes yes. And when he is done sewing he can put all the food that is left in the bag and go look at the pile of weapons she left in the corner out there. The lady in the yellow robe had a nice shortsword that she did not get a chance to draw. Maybe Noro can carry it.”

  


“This whole thing is ridiculous,” he grumbled, but he was still working at it. “I'm not going to deter anyone, just look at me! And nobody would believe a betmer has a Dunmer bodyguard, anyway.”

  


“We will make them to believe it,” she said calmly. “He will become more intimidating with a little food and exercise. Did he not kill four people with his bare hands yesterday?”

  


“That was magic. It wasn't real.”

  


“She is sure the four of them will be relieved to hear it. Hush now, sew.”

  


It didn't take that long to create a couple of rough bags. He put the remaining food in one and found a jar with a screw-on lid to fill with water. It wouldn't be enough to get them all the way to Molag Mar, but presumably Sahrid had some other plan for that. He stuffed it the rest of the way with as many of the fancier clothes as would fit, a comb, and a steel toothpick. Sahrid put the sewing kit, a fancy blue glass bottle that might be flin, and some more clothes in hers. Then Noro went out to look at the weapons and their harnesses. Annoying as it was to admit, his arms would shake if he tried to hold either of the two axes for more than a minute.

  


The tanto, the one that he had a vague nightmarish memory of stabbing into the Nord, looked very worn. It would have to be the short blade Sahrid had pointed out, a plain steel thing with a wooden handle that looked almost new, finished in dark red. As he turned it to and fro in the candle light, the blade looked oily and slick, carrying some sort of enchantment. He couldn't tell what kind. You had to practice with enchantments for a while to even be able to tell what one was. He belted it on so that it hung down by his right hip.

  


He'd never walked around carrying a weapon. That was asking for trouble he didn't want and attention he couldn't afford. It didn't make him feel any safer. It made him feel like he was wearing a sign around his neck saying _I'm looking for a fight, please stab me._

  


“I'm not carrying the axes around,” he said, turning to see Sahrid peering down at the shrine offerings. “They're too heavy and it'll look odd.”

  


“Eh, the clothes are worth more anyway,” she said, turning away with a flick of an ear. “Come along, bodyguard, you are going up the ladder first. It is your job now!”

  


Noro decided to save his energy rather than tell her what he thought of this, rolling his eyes as he headed for the door with his new shortsword on his hip and his new bag around his shoulder. He was better dressed than he'd ever been, armed, clean of skooma. As he hauled the broken door aside and went out into the familiar stench of the Vivec Underworks he had more thickness of sock and shoe between his foot and the dreck on the walkways than he had ever had the luxury of having. So why did he feel nothing more than subdued loathing? As he climbed the ladder his left hand passed before his eyes several times, showing him the new scars.

  


_She'll use me, and when I'm dead she'll get someone else. I don't mean a damn thing to her. At least when Verei told me she hated me it was personal!_

  


“How many were before me?” he asked as he hauled himself out up at the top. He went to wash his hands at one of the little waterfalls, finding suddenly that he didn't want the stink of sewage on his hands. There weren't many people around, so it must not be early morning or late evening. He heard Sahrid's garments rustle as she climbed out after him, but her big footpads were silent. A Dunmer woman in drab gray skirts stared at them briefly, surprised to see two such finely dressed people climbing out of the sewer, but she turned back to washing her basket of clothes without much interest.

  


“She has no idea what he means,” Sahrid said. She was at the fall next to him, holding up her skirts high enough to hold her feet in the water one at a time. Her hands were leaving damp spots on the velvet, already washed.

  


“How many idiots have you useed up and thrown away already?” Noro said patiently, drying his hands on the hips of his blue tunic.

  


“Noro is the very first, she promises,” Sahrid said cheerfully. “And if he does a good job then maybe she will not need another one. It will be interesting to find out!”

  


“Am I even a person to you?” he asked sullenly as he turned to move toward the distant stairs. Their voices echoed dimly from the walls, almost drowned out by the water.

  


“Is Khajiit a person to _you?”_ Sahrid asked calmly, from behind his right shoulder as she padded after him.

  


“You're more like one of those daedra that lies to a mer and then kills them when their guard is down,” Noro said.

  


“Ah, so surly Dunmer has heard of the Mazken. Well, don't worry, she has no designs on seducing him,” Sahrid said. Her tone was still light, amused. “And she has been informed repeatedly that Dunmer find all betmer to be equally unattractive. So she thinks we need have no worries on that score, no.”

  


“Lovely,” grumbled Noro, already out of breath as they climbed the stairs. Still – it wasn't as bad as he remembered. Maybe he was getting a little better. He was panting by the time they reached the Waistworks, dark-faced, but he had made it, and he wasn't sweating hard enough to spoil his new undershirt. They went from merchant to merchant, sorting out whatever any given person was ready to buy. A couple looked at them suspiciously, but no one asked where they'd gotten any of it. The finer clothes made a difference. He saw Verei's friend Killi Slaran with her basket on her arm, probably buying more thread for her seamstress work, and she glanced at him without recognizing him at all. She was drab compared to him in his new silk trousers and leather shoes, wearing the brown undyed linen that was the garb of those too poor to trade for dyed hand-me-downs.

  


Everyone was drab compared to Sahrid. It wasn't just the blue velvet robes; she seemed to expand to fill all available space with her expansive gestures, movement swirling her garments around her. Noro thought to himself that it was no wonder she'd had trouble hiding from the Ordinators. A change of clothes and hair wouldn't hide her for long, even if the solitary gold mask they had passed had not looked at them for more than a second.

  


At the end of a couple of hours they had more food in their bags, a couple of waterskins, and a pair of traveling cloaks. Sahrid had a pot, two bowls, two spoons, all of cheap tin; and a box of salt and a box of pepper. There were some drakes left over, hanging in a new pouch on Sahrid's hip. Noro did not ask how much. The less money he had in hand, the better. He had been far gone enough to have no illusions at all on that score. Though he quietly hated himself for it, as he always had, he was slightly grateful to Sahrid that she never brought it up, just accepted the money as he handed it over. It was the first positive emotion he had felt toward the Khajiit. He did not entirely trust it.

  


He was still thinking about this as they went out onto the walkway, fresh air from the lake caressing the loose strands of hair around his face as he squinted into the morning sun. He had long ago lost the wary alertness of the poor in favor of the indifference of the addict, so he wasn't paying attention at all to the sound of footsteps following, and only half to Sahrid's humming some tune under her breath.

  


Each of Vivec's cantons was shaped a bit like a giant sweetroll hovering above the brackish coastal waters of the Inner Sea, fat on the lower portion, flat on the bottom, narrowing slightly toward the top. Water poured from top to bottom, lofted there by magics Noro had never wondered about, and at last plunged from grates down at sewer level into the sea. It did not look like raw sewage, but he had never wondered if it was purified somehow, either.

  


Most cantons had a lower walkway, an upper walkway, and and an upper plaza, though whether the plaza was open or covered varied. The walkways were broad enough to drive two carts abreast, and usually thronged with people. St. Delyn and St. Olms were meant to be havens of the pious and impoverished, like Verei. She had long had ambitions to expand her rag-picking business into actually making paper to sell, to having her own shop up in St. Delyn's Plaza. It was mostly Dunmer that crowded the walkways, a few with hopeless, stumbling steps, but most with the narrow-eyed determination to better themselves that had earned them a place here to start with. There was a gentle waft of smoke from the pie vendors, smelling powerfully of onions and saltrice, cheaper to pad out the stuffing than meat. There were the mixed smells of Dunmer in various flavors of down on their luck: sweat, nix-grease soap, cheap fabric, sandal leather. There was an occasional Outlander here, or a Khajiit or Argonian whose virtue and devotion to Ayem had earned them a place in spite of their race. A gray dull-furred fellow with big muttonchop whiskers to either side his muzzle stared at Sahrid as they passed. He was dressed in the same drab linens as everybody else.

  


The natural flow of traffic eventually nudged them into an odd little cul-de-sac between the stalls of street vendors, a bootblack on one side, a flower stall on the other. The mixed smell of shoe polish and black anther was not a pleasant one, but Sahrid was standing up against the wall rummaging in her bag.

  


“What are you doing?” Noro asked, turning to look. “This isn't a good place to stop.” The shadow of one stall covered all the way to the other, leaving them in the dim despite the bright day.

  


“She must make sure she bought more thread, yes. It is a long way they have to go yet,” said the Khajiit, and then Noro turned and found himself looking into the nostrils of a much larger mer, a Dunmer in brown woolens with a gaudy red sash around his waist, white hair loose and stringy around his chin. He reeked of sujamma, and as Noro wrinkled his nose he felt the prickle of a knife in his ribs. Muscle shifted in the mer's arms under his shirt.

  


“All right, let's have the bags,” he said.

  


“Psh. He is drunk,” Sahrid said. “Pass on, and she says no more about it.”

  


“Shut up, bitch,” the Dunmer said, without taking his eyes from Noro's. “I don't need to hear from any damned Khajiit. Give me the bags.”

  


Noro shrugged as Sahrid edged behind him. He did not feel particularly afraid. That was what he remembered about it later. It wasn't that he was brave. It was that he was tired and annoyed, and whatever glands were supposed to be responsible for being terrified had been wrung dry yesterday.

  


“I'm going to be annoyed if my shirt gets ruined,” he said, and felt the warm pulse of magicka against his back. Twice. Nothing happened to his mind. He was very sharply aware of the world seeming to slow down. The robber was trying to stab him. He could feel the dagger pressing against his flesh just below the ribs, but it was as slow as though he had been moving through water, a skooma dream. Noro snatched at his wrist and felt the bones break under his fingers. The man's cry of pain was a strangely deep and protracted sound in his ears.

  


_Now what do I do? I don't know a damned thing about fighting, and if I kill him there'll be trouble._ He now remembered vividly what had happened to the face of the last person he'd hit as hard as he could while under the influence of Sahrid's spells. Instead he jerked his knee up into the mer's crotch, trying to restrain the amount of force he used, and then as he started to slowly double over he shoved him into the wall. There was a _crunch_ as his arm broke.

  


“Goooooo nooooow,” Sahrid was saying, still with that strange deep slowness to her voice as she tugged at his sleeve. Noro turned to navigate back out into the walk, consciously walking at what seemed to him an unnaturally slow speed. The robber's long, now higher-pitched shrieks of pain were attracting attention, but two people walking calmly away were ignored. There was nothing about Noro's face that would attract attention. He was just another skinny Dunmer, heavy-eyed, weary with the weariness of years. His clothes were unusually fine. That probably drew some notice. But clothes were not a good way to recognize someone for long.

  


They pursued their way along the walk and around the corner onto the quarter-walk that faced the distant beach, the tall tops of the palm trees and cyprus stretching away into the morning mists across the green hillocks of the estuary. Every so often someone would step wrong when they were out alone, and vanish beneath the green surface never to be seen again until some slaughterfish surfaced with a fingerbone inside it. For the most part the danger was minimal unless you wanted very badly to get to the season's last untouched blooms of willow anther and gold kanet. Say, because you were a junkie hoping to scrape together enough money for another bottle of skooma from the alchemist's, but you weren't so far gone you couldn't make the walk. Yet. It had been a near thing for Noro once or twice, back before he stopped every going further than the Waistworks.

  


Noro listened to Sahrid negotiating a ride to the shore with the gondolier, her breath puffing out as steam now that they were down on the wooden walkway below the edge of the canton. He could feel the heat radiating from the clay wall beside them, and on his other side the cold air of Sun's Dusk nipping at his right sleeve. It felt uncannily slow, sitting still in the gondola as it was rowed across, the gondolier's head bent beneath his bit conical straw hat. The effect did not even begin to wear off until they were well out on the other shore. He shook his head as the world suddenly seemed to speed up again.

  


“Finally,” he said. “Gods, that spell lasts a long time.”

  


“But yes,” Sahrid said. “Did not Ko'sahrid tell you she is powerful mage? Your strength did not last quite as long, but there was no way for you to know that.” She dug her new cloak out of her bag and shook it out to put it on. He did the same as they walked. They kept to the higher walkway, packed dirt and quite safe, the treacherous green bog stretching away into the fog around them. The air was cold and damp. He could feel water beading on his skin as they went.

  


“It feels like being underwater,” Noro said.

  


“But it makes a scrawny mer like Noro a terrifying monster to someone twice his size. Only the greatest of warriors or someone backed by a mage of power equal to Ko'sahrid is a threat to him, and trust her, there are very few Restorationists of power equal with Ko'sahrid. Certainly none where we are going,” she said. “He remembers this, and he is not such a coward. We turn to the East when we have passed beyond the swampy bits, yes. And then it is only a couple of days' walk to Lanozhakiri once we have finished our business within the Tomb of Nereilu.”

  


He glared at her at the comments on his cowardice, but he was distracted by the last sentence before he could say anything particularly acidic about it.

  


“You never said anything about a Tomb of Nereilu,” he said sullenly.

  


“Oh, did she forget to mention it?” the Khajiit asked innocently. “Well, it should be a very quick errand. They will have only a short stroll down to pay their respects as pious worshippers of Ayem ought to do.”

  


“You're going to steal something,” Noro interpreted glumly.

  


“Not stealing, not stealing! Nobody is using it!” she protested.

  


“Something valuable, or you wouldn't risk it. A lot of ancestral tombs have undead guarding them,” he said.

  


“Ah, but an honest woman has nothing to fear from the righteous dead.”

  


“Because you're sending me in first,” Noro concluded.

  


“But of course,” Sahrid said. Her smug purring little voice fell flat against the walls of fog, coming back almost muffled. “That is why you are here. Do not worry, anything else you find besides the Robe of Ko'zatho is yours to keep.”

  


“You think you can keep me quiet about your heresy and theft by implicating me in it?” he said. “This isn't like killing daedric cultists. Looting tombs is punishable by -” he stopped. He wasn't actually sure what the punishment was. He'd never known anyone who had tried it. “Well, it's probably severely punished.”

  


“No doubt,” Sahrid said. “Did she mention to you what she stole from the Library of Vivec?”

  


“No, you said it was a secret,” he said.

  


“Yes. It was Selvyn's Transcendent Frenzy,” Sahrid said. “He will not have heard of it, perhaps, though he has felt it once. The important fact is that if they catch Sahrid they will flay her alive and make of her a rug for the Temple floor. So she is not too terribly worried about the penalty for borrowing old relics that nobody is using.”

  


“That's not a reason for ME to keep quiet,” Noro said.

  


_Of COURSE it's the one she used on me. Why wouldn't it be?_

  


“True, true. Noro is welcome to run off and find the authorities any time he likes,” said the Khajiit. “Of course, then he will have no gainful employment and he will be stuck right back in the sewer with the rest of the garbage. Would Noro like to be something other than garbage?”

  


Noro was silent for several moments, struggling with his anger. Trying to stab or strangle the infuriating s'wit while she had enough power to cast her charm spell would probably result in her walking him right into the swamp to be eaten by the slaughterfish. Or worse, she would come up with something even more humiliating and then not kill him at all.

  


“I'm still trying to decide if I care,” he said finally. “You're one of the worst people I've ever met.”

  


“Ah, so we have advanced to people. Good,” she said.

  


“Shut up.”

  


The Khajiit shrugged. It did not seem to dampen her mood as they walked on, finally turning down a narrower dirt track with the Sun in front and overhead as the morning wore on and the mist burned off. Now they were in a country of grassy rolling hills, dryer and speckled with vast mushrooms, brush dotted with comberry bushes clustered around their trunks. This close to the city the red berries were nearly all gone, a few crushed on the ground or withered on the stalk the only evidence of a heavy crop. The comberries would bloom and fruit year-round, but they were never barer than just before the cold of Evening Star arrived, when everyone knew the lean times were coming.

  


A cliff racer glided from tree down to mushroom in the distance, long barbed tail stretching out beyond its triangular tan-colored pinions. The creatures had the heads of birds, but their bodies were naked of feathers, gliding on fleshy wings as taut as the canvas of a ship. An adult cliff racer could have wings as broad as Noro was tall, and sequester enough venom to kill a large child or a small adult. They had no feet. He'd never seen a live one at ground level. In the distance he could hear the obnoxious honk-squeak calls of several:

  


_SQUONK. SQUEEEEEONK._

  


“Has he ever had racer tail soup?” Sahrid asked presently.

  


“No,” he said. “That's for nobs.”

  


“Ah. Well, if one should swoop too low he may get the chance to try it, yes. There is no reason to let the dry foods get irksome if we need not,” she said.

  


“If you're assuming I can cook, you're very wrong,” he said. “After Verei left I lived on cheap pies and skooma.”

  


“Ah, but Sahrid is a very good cook,” she said.

  
“But you never learned to sew? I don't believe you,” Noro said.

  


“Sewing was elder sister's job, yes. Cooking Sahrid's. Little brother has no thumbs, had to run around with duster in his mouth,” Sahrid said. Her ears were high. It was impossible to tell how much of it she was making up.

  


“He has no thumbs?” Noro said skeptically.

  


“But yes, J'sulo is alfiq, born under the wane of both moons. Sister Malurai was born under new Masser and Secunda Full, is ohmes, yes. And of course Sahrid is born under Masser new, Secundus Waning, is suthay-raht. Parents did not bother counting days and had children of different shapes according to the Lattice, yes.”

  
  


“What's an alfiq look like, then?” Noro asked. He had a vague idea that ohmes looked basically like Bosmer with tails and weird ears, small and tan, and some of them tattooed cat-looking marks on their faces to look more Khajiit.

  
  


“Alfiq goes on all fours, is about yea big.” She held her hands apart perhaps two and a half feet. “Is bigger than rat, smaller than wolf. Cannot talk, has not thumbs. J'sulo worked hard to learn telekinesis so he could write, so he could talk to everyone. Many alfiq are good mages.”

 

  


“Are your parents mages?” he asked. She had to have learned from somewhere, and she'd mentioned her family had been wealthy.

  


“Mother was mage, just a little. Father is Imperial Cult priest, yes. Very venerable. Very cautious. Very boring,” she said. “Noro should not ask questions of Sahrid he does not want to answer himself.”

  


He shrugged one shoulder.

  


“I'm not ashamed of my parents. They drink too much, they work hard for no good reason. Far as I know they're still potters. It's not their fault I wasn't good for anything.” He thought about that for a moment. “Not Verei's, either. She tried to make something of me.”

  


“Verei was wife?” she asked.

  


“Verei was wife. She left me right around the time she found out I used her dowry to buy a big box of skooma. Let's not talk,” Noro said. His throat was starting to hurt from doing more talking than he had done in months.

  


“If he likes,” said the Khajiit. Her ears were high, yellow eyes fixed on the way ahead. She did not so much as twitch her tail as they walked on.

  


  


 


	4. Chapter 4

After that Noro bent all his effort toward walking.  As the day progressed he began to feel sore, bone-deep ache in his shoulders and arms first, then his hips and buttocks, then his legs and even feet.  He had gone from days of doing nothing to a violent burst of activity, then total collapse, then walking again.  The surprising thing was that he hadn't been stiff as a board when he woke up.    
  
Sahrid didn't seem bothered at all, having a drink as she walked but never apparently out of breath.  Noro, determined not to be outwalked by the object of his alternate ambivalence and hatred, gritted his teeth and struggled on.  When he had gone as long as he possibly could, when he was the color of ebony ore and sweating and gasping for breath, he looked up and saw the sun just passing zenith overhead.  
  
"She is hungry," Sahrid said.  "They stop by that rock up there and eat and drink, yes."  She did not look at him, but she didn't have to; she could hear and smell him.  He seethed silently at that as he caught his breath, drinking lukewarm water from his jar first. 

  
  


Noro paused, distracted from his resentment as he stared down at the jar. How had he ever thought water was bland?  Nothing had ever tasted better.  He emptied the jar, throat bobbing as he swallowed.  He still had a full skin sloshing around in his bag.  He shot Sahrid a challenging glance, but she ignored him, sitting on top of the rock staring off into the distance down the narrow dirt track as she tore at a hunk of jerky with her sharp teeth.  Something gray and amorphous loomed far off, the low hills of Molag Amur shrouded in the steam of its many vents and mud pools.

  
  


“One, maybe two more hours and they will reach the tomb,” Sahrid said. “They can rest there tonight. Water is nearby.”

  
  


“You think I'm going to sleep in a tomb?” Noro shot her a look.

  
  


“Friend Noro will sleep in the dirt where he falls if they go on much further than that,” she pointed out. She barely sounded out of breath. A burst of profanity answered her. She grinned. “Anyhow, he is welcome to stay awake and keep watch as long as he likes. She does not stop you.”

  
  


Noro choked down a handful of dried fruit and jerky, drank a more conservative sip from his water skin, and grimly hauled the strap of the bag over his shoulder to walk on. Food and water made him feel a little less miserable, but it didn't make his body ache less.

  
  


_Why am I here?_

  
  


_You know why,_ he told himself, and that was about the end of that. Sahrid was awful, but she wasn't wrong. He had been ready to let his life end in a filthy hole surrounded by shit. This wasn't worse than that.

  
  


He would never have noticed the tomb on his own. The grass around them was growing short and stubby, gradually shading from greens to tans to scattered red-browns as the afternoon wore on. Sahrid turned off the path seemingly at random, sniffing, and Noro turned to tramp over the sandy ground after her. A few moments later he heard the distant sound of trickling water, and a murky rivulet, hardly worthy of being called a creek, sprang up on their left. It led them to a cleft in a pile of lichen-encrusted rocks, and beyond that was a shriveled, dying mushroom, shading what at first appeared to be a small hill. On the other side it sheltered a reinforced clay doorway, the lintel pointed at the top, and a solid wooden door.

  
  


“Perfect. Here we are,” Sahrid said, ears perking up higher. “Come. It is not a large tomb. We should find the robe very easily.”

  
  


“Hurgh,” said Noro, and went to haul the door open ahead of her, squinting at the puff of dust this dislodged from above the door. He was looking into a deep darkness... And then a dim orange-yellow light. There was a lit torch in a sconce at the bottom of what would prove to be a long flight of stairs. He limped down it, clinging to the wooden handrail. The scent of smoke and incense was stronger down here, bringing back memories of when he was small and his parents had taken him to the public tomb under a canton to see the pit that held the ashes of his grandparents. He could not shake the sense of guilt as he grabbed at the lower handle and wrenched the door open.

  
  


The space beyond was surprisingly much better lit, but that was not the first thing he noticed. Noro covered his nose with a sleeve, trying not to gag at the stench of death and rot.

  
  


“What in Oblivion,” he hissed. Bodies left in a tomb should be ashes or bones, not corpses left to rot. The customs of Dunmer were nothing like those of Nords or Imperials in this regard. He squinted around. They were in a long, broad passage with a high ceiling, cobwebs and darkness high above, cobwebs and darkness gathering in the pools of shadow around the lit sconces. In front of them stretched twin rows of clay altars molded as part of the floor along the walls, flat-topped to hold the two-foot urns that held the dust of the dead. It was all the same tan and brown: tan floor, brown trim, tan urns with brown rings around the top. Only the sparse offerings had color: a shriveled red blossom here, a folded blue skirt there, the glint of a glass bottle of liquor over here. They rested in front of the urns, each an offering to a particular ancestor or relation. All of it was covered with a thick layer of dust.

  
  


So it was very easy to see the footprints. And the long drag mark beside them.

  
  


“This was NOT part of her plan,” Sahrid hissed back, and he felt warmth at his back again as she started casting spells on him – quickly, almost frantically, he thought.

  
  


“What wasn't? What are you talking about?” he demanded, then his head whipped around as he saw movement from the corner of his eye. At the far end of the room was a deeper darkness, all the lights put out. Out of it stepped a Dunmer woman, her face lined and ancient, lips wrinkled back from unnaturally long fangs. Her tan homespun robe was long and tattered. Her eyes were red – all Dunmer eyes were red. But hers reflected the light back with a faint glow, as though something at the back of them were reflective.

  
  


“Oh, f -” was all that Noro had time to say. She took one step and was suddenly in front of him, grabbing at his shoulders. He jerked back and barely eluded her. She was startled, recoiling for a second, but then she grinned again – her breath was blood and rot – and he did not even see her move before she had him by the throat. He clutched at her hands, trying to tear them away, but even with Sahrid's spells it was so hard that he could only pry at one finger at a time.

  
  


And then he felt the voice. Felt, not heard. It did not enter through the ears.

  
  


_**What sort of little mer are you?** _

  
  


Noro made a choked noise because he could not really scream. He felt her rake through his mind like a careless child with her fingers in water, and that was exactly how much resistance he was able to mount.

  
  


_**No one will miss you when you're gone. Sad for you. Good for me.** _ _**Be still, and be consumed.** _

  
  


And he was still, unable to move a muscle. His hands dropped limply to his sides even as inside the monster smothered his screams. He had no idea where Sahrid was. Perhaps she had made herself invisible, had hidden. The monster grinned at him, face to face, and then she jerked his head to one side and buried her fangs in his throat. He could not make the smallest noise of pain, eyes bulging wide with panic as he felt her pierce him. If she had seized on the great artery he would be dead in less than a minute. Would he know which it was? All he felt was pain, pain and the sensation of being an insect pinned by a giant eye, that other mind clamped around his as her jaws were clamped into his flesh.

  
  


And then there was a great light. The monster released him with a stunningly loud shriek of feral agony, blood-smeared mouth wide. Flames licked up around her shoulders and arms. Noro staggered, suddenly in control of his own limbs again – weak, achy, but his – and jerked the steel shortsword from its sheath and stabbed the monster in the center of the chest. Flakes of ice flew for the instant before she exploded into gray dust. It momentarily blinded him, filling his nose and his gaping mouth. Her scream seemed to go on forever, long after she was nothing but a settling pile of rags and ashes.

  
  


Noro dropped to his knees, coughing as he tried to rub the ashes out of his eyes on his sleeve. He felt as though he were made of of scrib jelly, head light and floaty, ringing as if the screams still went on. The first thing his watering eyes saw was a torch, hovering in the air. It took some seconds to parse out the very dim outline of a robed figure.

  
  


Noro tried to get up and the room blinked out for what felt like a second, and then he was sitting with his head against someone's shoulder, blue light flaring in front of his eyes. Sahrid was visible again. He could see the folds of her velvet robe, the shape of breast and knee just fuzzy abstracts from his current angle. He sat shaking, disgusted with himself but unable to rise, still heavy and weak.

  
  


“Noro is a good bodyguard,” the Khajiit said, more quietly than was usual for her. The torch lay guttering on the floor in the corner of his vision.

  
  


He could only produce a guttural moan in his throat for answer. The monster's voice still echoed through him, cold, amused, and careless. He was an insect. Less than an insect. A little puff of dust, dull and useless and easily scattered to nothing. He was too absorbed in his own misery to be surprised at the Khajiit stroking his hair.

  
  


“Khajiit could feel her as well,” she said softly. “But she saw Dunmer first, because Dunmer went in front. If she had seen Sahrid first they both would be dead. He is not worthless. No one could have done better. He killed a vampire, Noro did, an old one and very powerful.” As she spoke he was nearly blinded by the blue light near his face, and warmth flowed into him from the head down, strengthening his trembling limbs.

  
  


Noro sat up straight, and she let go with a final firm press of one hand on his back. Sahrid scooted away and rolled gracefully up onto her feet, scooping up her torch. Noro looked around for the shortsword and found it near the new pile of ashes, scraps of brown fabric interspersed with the gray dust. He wiped the blade on a rag and sheathed it.

  
  


Sahrid turned toward the dark end of the room, scooping up her dropped torch from the floor in one smooth movement. It flickered and grew brighter as she held it upright. Noro climbed to his feet and had to stop and lean on a clay altar for a second as the room tilted. When he looked up she was close enough that the torch had mostly purged away the darkness, the ring of weak yellow light chasing shadows up the walls.

  
  


The shallow pit of ashes with its round rim was still there, but at one side was piled a rough nest of the finest fabrics the inhabitant had been able to assemble, scraps of silk and linen and what looked like part of a green velvet robe. In the pit there were dead bodies. Noro wasn't sure how many, because some of them had been torn limb from limb, and the oldest ones were so shriveled and lumped together it was hard to tell what had belonged to whom. All were naked. The freshest was at least a couple of weeks old, bloated and awful and no longer even recognizable as male or female. Sahrid stood looking at it with her ears flat. Noro leaned on the altar, trying not to throw up.

  
  


_No one will miss you when you're gone._ He straightened slowly and moved toward her, trying to breathe through his mouth. Every one of them had died in terror and agony, as he nearly had. The vampires of Vvardenfell were not silken seducers like some of their brethren in Cyrodiil and Skyrim. They were monsters of an older world, cold and brutal, lacking even the thinnest skin of their lost mortality. The knowledge of what these people's last moments had been made him dizzy and ill. He wanted to lie down, curl up in a small ball, and weep like a sick infant, but most desperately he needed to prove that he was alive and worth something.

  
  


“I'll hold the torch,” he said. Sahrid did not complain of the shakiness of the light in his hand. She just crouched by the corner to sort through the pile of clothes, one ear flickering up and then down.

 

She came up with a slick ball of fabric that seemed to change color slightly as it moved and a couple of other things he couldn't clearly see, scooting away to turn her shoulder to the pit as quickly as she could.

  
  


“Come on. Let us go out into the fresh air,” Sahrid said.

  
  


Noro hung up the torch in the sconce from which Sahrid had originally taken it, down at the base of the stairs. He made it about three stairs up before everything went tilty. He sat down abruptly on a step, leaning an elbow on the one above it. The sound of Sahrid's pads scuffed behind and below him, and he thought he felt a hand on his shoulder again, but it was too dark to really tell, and then it was very quiet as well.

  
  


The darkness was full of glowing eyes and mocking laughter. He swam up out of it still quivering, but warmer, something wrapped tight around his shoulders. Noro shifted slightly and realized he was lying on his side, something solid at his back. He squinted his eyes open. He was still in the tomb, and a groping hand found that the thing behind him was the stairs. He was wrapped in two cloaks, his own and Sahrid's – he knew it was hers because it was blue. There was no sign of the Khajiit. There was no sound at all other than the occasional hiss of one of the torches. He shuddered harder and turned to start upward toward the door.

  
  


The feeling of crushing worthlessness had receded to a mocking echo in his mind, leaving him at least able to form coherent thoughts, but it took him a few minutes to get up the steps. He had to pause every couple of minutes when he got dizzy. He couldn't stop the shakes completely no matter how hard he tried. On the way he gradually became aware that he was not sweaty any more, and his clothes did not stink. Sahrid must have used her cleansing spell on him or on them both before she went.

  
  


He was more than a little annoyed to find the door locked. He shoved at it weakly and ineffectually.

  
  


“Ah, Noro is awake,” said a voice from outside, slightly muffled but very familiar.

  
  


His voice came at his call more readily this time, rough and unpleasant, but capable of being understood. “So you did stay,” he said wearily. “Why's the door locked?”

  
  


“In case you felt inclined to try and strangle her again, like last time,” Sahrid said calmly.

  
  


“Why would I do that? You said this wasn't part of your -” he paused, leaning his forehead against the door. There must be some other reason she expected him to be angry. Something earlier? Maybe to do with the mer who'd tried to rob them?

  
  


“You could've used your Charm on that thug we met and not drawn attention to us. Not risked an Ordinator recognizing you,” he said slowly. “You spent two spells on me instead. Why?”

  
  


“She wanted him to feel strong,” Sahrid said. “So that he would defend her without her having to do anything to his mind, like he said. But NOT because she planned on a vampire! She would never have risked that herself, he surely must see!”

  
  


Noro stood there for a moment, eyes shut, still leaning on the door as he tried to think. Her voice was vehement, convincing. But she'd lied to him before, at least twice, always because she had something to gain. Still – would she have risked it? The monster could have killed him and turned and killed her as well. She wanted to keep her own skin intact bad enough to do something as harebrained as involving him in her escape to begin with. He didn't have the energy to think about it.

  
  


“You stupid fetcher,” he said, without heat. “ I believe you. Let me out. It stinks in here.”

  
  


There was a long pause. Then there was a soft click, and the door opened to reveal Sahrid, standing there with a rusty key in her hand. She backed up, watching him warily with one ear up and one down. He shoved the door shut behind him and leaned on it, inhaling the fresh air gratefully. It was cold, but he found he didn't mind. The shakes lessened away from the dread air of the tomb.

  
  


“Where'd you get that?” he asked. To his surprise, the sun was setting. There was a small fire burning in a pile of twigs, a tin pot of something that smelled rich and meaty bubbling on top of it. He swayed over to flop down next to it, unshouldering his bag to lay his head on it. After a second he sat up and tossed Sahrid's balled-up cloak at her. She caught it deftly and put it on, pulling it close around her shoulders as she came to squat across from him. She wiggled her shoulders into it unabashedly, savoring the warmth he had left. Her things were piled on the other side of the fire from where he now lay.

  
  


“Vampire had it,” she said. “Also she had some other useful things. One of them was the robe Sahrid needs, and one was this.” She took a shortsword scabbard with a belt from her bag and leaned far over to lay it in the grass where he could reach it. He dragged it over to look at it without lifting his head. The scabbard was framed in steel, embossed in the Imperial style with stylized vines and flowers, but the main body of it was black, black and mirror-bright, the handle matching it. The pommel was steel too, with a clear stone in the end that might be a diamond but was probably some kind of tourmaline. It felt heavy, heavier than the steel shortsword. He tugged the blade out to look at it. It was black, too, like shining glass. When he plucked a hair and waved it toward the edge in a trembling hand, it fell neatly in two.

  
  


“Veloth's golden cock,” he swore, sitting up abruptly as he sheathed it again. It slid in silently, the scabbard probably silked. “It's ebony.”

  
  


Sahrid's teeth gleamed across the fire. “Oh yes,” she said. “It would cost a small fortune to buy such a blade. There probably are not five on this entire wretched isle.”

  
  


He eyed her warily. “And you'll have me keep that, will you?”

  
  


“He has earned it. Besides, did not she tell you that she found the robe of Ko'zatho?” She tugged something out of her bag and held it up to the firelight. The fabric of it was red silk, with a paler orange underlayer peeping at the throat and sleeves. It was embroidered with jet-black beads in the patterns of stylized flames around all of the visible hems. Enchantment crawled over it, faint iridescence in the dim light. It looked perfectly clean. Noro had a sudden, vivid mental picture of Sahrid piling everything she'd found on top of his unconscious body before casting her spell.

  
  


“Why, what's that for?” he asked.

  
  


“It defends the wearer from fire. And now we eat.”

  
  


“Eat what?” he asked.

  
  


“Ah, well.” She was pulling the two tin bowls out of her bag as she spoke, handing him one. “It turns out that you get to try racer tail soup after all. One came to see what she was doing as she was gathering wood for the fire.”

  
  


“And I'm supposed to believe you killed it yourself?” Noro asked.

  
  


“She has a spell that makes her very hard to hit. While it tried to stab and bite her, she hit it in the head with a rock,” Sahrid said. “Cliff racers are not very bright. She threw the carcass over there, if he wants to see it.”

  
  


The smell was making his mouth water, but out of sheer guar-headed stubbornness he climbed to his feet and stumbled over to look down the other side of the hollow. There was definitely a dead cliff racer without a tail, tangled in its own leathery wings.

  
  


“Well, what d'you know,” he said.

  
  


“She is not always a liar.” Sahrid was already eating, very neatly and delicately with her spoon. Noro sat back down to scoop out some soup for himself, tapping the bowl on the side of the pot to get rid of as many drips as he could before he started eating. It took some care. His hands still weren't steady. There were bits of dried mushroom and chunks of greasy, rich-flavored meat in the thick broth. She must've gotten some starch from somewhere when he wasn't paying attention. Saltrice flour, maybe.

  
  


“That's good,” he said grudgingly. “I can see why you like it.” They ate in mutually non-hostile silence for a while. Presently Noro asked, “So how'd you know where to find the robe?”

  
  


“Well, she was in the Library of Vivec for more than one reason,” Sahrid said. “She had not only to learn her very difficult and important spell, she had to find the locations of the things that she needs. The robe was in Nereilu's Tomb, and in lost Lanozhakiri she believes there is a daedric longsword, a prize of such worth that it can hardly be calculated.”

  
  


“If both of those things were mentioned in the books, why hasn't someone else already come and gotten them?” Noro asked skeptically.

  
  


“One has to know what one is looking for. It is not as simple as go to this place and here it is,” Sahrid said, dropping the spoon into her half-empty bowl so she could gesture airily with one hand. “One had to read of the friendship between the old scholar Selvyn Nereilu and the mage Ko'zatho, and then a reference in a complete different book to Ko'zatho leaving a great memorial gift, and then in yet a third reference that he was never seen with his famous robe in his later years. And then one had to look up the location of Selvyn's ancestral tomb, of course. To find the location of the ruin was a similar process of research.”

  
  


She rattled on as they ate. Noro listened with half an ear. She liked the sound of her own voice, and he was not currently averse to hearing it. He still felt unbalanced, afraid of what he would see when he slept. For the first time in forever, it wasn't angry Verei. This was worse. He wished for skooma, for something to blunt the memory of that pile of bodies, that voice of gloating domination piercing his mind. But now they were far from anywhere that he could get any. And if they hadn't been, he'd left all the money in Sahrid's hands. He'd have to settle for filling his stomach as full as he could. It was a little comfort, a thing he had not cared about in a long time but that bound him firmly to life and the real in that moment.

  
  


When Sahrid paused to scrape her bowl, waving at Noro to refill his, he said,

  
  


“What do you want a daedric longsword for, anyhow? You can't use it. It'll be too heavy.”

  
  


“She does not intend to wield it, she intends to offer it in exchange for something precious,” Sahrid said. “Mama was carried away by the Sky-Cat many years since. Ahnurr, Papa, he still is a priest of the Nine. Malurai and J'sulo are doing all right for themselves in Ebonheart, but they will never earn enough to buy the thing that she seeks, and certainly not to keep it afterward. The longsword will be a good start.”

  
  


“A good start,” Noro repeated blankly. “You're insane, woman.”

  
  


“Maybe,” Sahrid said, ears high. “But Noro was dying of skooma in a sewer, and she was hiding from the law with nothing but her clothes and a few drakes, and now we are finely clothed and armed and well-fed. Stand by Ko'Sahrid, and she will do well by you, yes.”

  
  


He opened his mouth to say _until I die and the next one comes along,_ but then shut it. He still believed she had done everything she had done below out of complete self-interest, but he didn't have the energy to argue. She was all the help that he had. And though he still felt a dull loathing for her, a terrible person to heal and feed him was better than none. He wasn't going to get a better offer than that, not ever, not from anyone. The fact was that the old monster had been almost right. He wasn't quite worthless as long as he was worth something to Sahrid.

  
  


“Well, we'll see,” he said. Sahrid beamed, teeth gleaming in the firelight.

  
  


They slept on opposite sides of the fire. Sahrid, with unexpected delicacy, perhaps realized he did not want to be touched. Or more likely she was warm enough from the fire and did not require the use of her substitute hot water bottle, Noro thought. He lay awake for a long time. The sound of the fire was too like the sound of the torches below. He kept imagining that he heard the foosteps of the vampire, so, so fast, shuffling in the dust. At last a full belly and exhaustion must have done their useful work, because eventually he opened his eyes on the dead embers, his ears and nose cold outside the blanket. He did not remember dreaming, and the shaking seemed to have passed off in the night. Noro sat up slowly. This time he was ready for the agony in every muscle, gritting his teeth. Would there ever be a time when everything did not hurt? At least he was used to sleeping with little padding between him and the hard ground.

  
  


He could not say that he felt strengthened and inspired, but he did feel sullenly determined to survive in the face of whatever Sahrid planned to throw him at next. The voice of the old vampire was still with him, mocking at his weakness, and in daylight he defied it with the same seething silent anger.

  
  


The Khajiit was already awake, singing quietly in Ta'agra as she packed the pot and bowls; she must have cleaned them while he slept. Noro rose and shook out his cloak, then brushed the dust off the bag he'd been using as a pillow, eager to get moving and warm again. He relieved himself out of sight behind the mushroom, then took time to refill his water jar with the murky water flowing down the pile of rocks. He drank as much as he could hold. It tasted faintly of dirt.

  
  


“Is good idea. Their way leads through Molag Amur,” Sahrid said from behind him. “They will reach Lanozhakiri tonight. There will be water near the ruin, but water the daedra worshippers will drink may not be the same as water anyone else would wish to. She has already taken her turn, yes. Does he need more food before they start?” As he turned back she stood with hand on one hip, ears high. If she felt any ill effect of the events of yesterday it did not show.

  
  


“No,” he said shortly, as he buckled the ebony shortsword on his left hip. He wore the steel blade on his right. It had saved him once. He wasn't ready to leave it behind on account of the weight yet. Besides, it was nothing at all compared to the weight of the other. “What daedra is it?”

  
  


“Molag Bal,” she said. He shot her a look as he limped back toward the dirt track, glad enough to put distance between them and the tomb.

  
  


“Of course it is,” he said. “It couldn't be Azurans or maybe a bunch of Sheogorites too high to know which way is up or a bunch of Sanguinites drunk off their asses. It had to be a lot of sadists that worship the King of Rape.” A horrible thought occurred to him, and he eyed her suspiciously as she trotted past him to lead the way up the narrow path through the damp grass. “Are there going to be more vampires?”

  
  


“Definitely not,” Sahrid said firmly. “Vampires do not haunt the daedric shrines, no. They keep to their own tombs, and some the old Dwemer places. Sahrid does not want to die. She would not lead Noro Laend into a place with one vampire on purpose, let alone many. No, they face mortal cultists, some in armor, amb on durmeror.” The last three words were muffled and incomprehensible as she turned her head to face forward again, seemingly by accident.

  
  


“I didn't catch that last bit.”

  
  


“Ahem. And one dremumor.”

  
  


“You're not saying it loud enough on purpose,” he said irritably.

  
  


“And one dremora.”

  
  


“Fuck you, Sahrid,” Noro said, anger rising to cover the drop and twist in his gut. “If you think for one second I'm going to try and fight a greater daedra for you -”

  
  


“It will be easy! She has her spells for him, he has an ebony sword, and now they have the robe of Ko'zatho,” Sahrid said, ears still high, ignoring his tone completely. “So the flames of the dremora cannot harm him.”

  
  


“Ebony can't pierce daedric armor, you filthy s'wit! Even I know that!”

  
  


“In the hand of Noro Laend with the spells of Ko'Sahrid, it will cut even a stone,” she said. “It will pierce daedric armor. You will see.”

  
  


His answer was an inarticulate snarl as he stumped along the trail beside her.

  
  


“Cultists of Molag Bal keep what they take from their victims. There will be rich plunder for Noro Laend as well,” she said coaxingly.

  
  


“I don't know why you still think I care about money,” he said.

  
  


“Everyone cares about money,” said Sahrid. “The road to happiness perhaps is not paved with drakes, but they shorten the stairs that climb onto it, yes. The velvet robe does not bring joy, but the full belly does. When Noro has accepted that he is going to live to be old, he will care also. Already he is stronger than before.”

  
  


“No, I'm not,” he said, but with less vehemence. “Just because your damned spells can turn me into a freak for five minutes, that doesn't mean _I'm_ stronger.”

  
  


“But he walks about and carries things and climbs stairs,” Sahrid said. “All of these strengthen him more than lying down underground. He is just cranky because he is sore.”

  
  


“I don't even know how to use a shortsword,” he said, ignoring the last statement because it was true. “I've just been flailing at everything and trying to get them in the chest.”

  
  


“He will get better with practice. They do not have time for him to be trained yet, no. When they have what Sahrid wants, maybe sister Malurai will have time to teach him some things. She is a great swordswoman!”

  
  


_Then why didn't you bring her?_ Noro thought, but he knew the reason.  _If I had a sister, I wouldn't want to subject her to this. Not even I would._ He shuddered in his cloak, hopefully not noticeable to the Khajiit.  _It's because you are worthless,_ said a voice in his head, and it was only partly his own. It was the voice of the old vampire and the voice of Verei and the voice of employer after employer.

  
  


_Why couldn't I have fallen in with literally anyone less obnoxious than Sahrid?_

  
  


_Because no one else would want you, that's why,_ he thought, and with that cold comfort he was obliged to be content for all the long, aching walk that occupied the day.

 


	5. Chapter 5

The day began clear but gradually grew overcast, gray clouds listlessly drifting in to cover the sky. The grass gradually began to grow shorter and duller as they walked, first brownish, then reddish, then fading away into nothing to leave the stony ground bare and scattered with gravel. Trama sprang up to replace it, tangles of leafless fat gray vines ranging in thickness from a little finger to bigger than Noro's leg. The slimmer and younger vines were encrusted with thorns, but the largest were smooth, their skin now too tough to require defense from smaller creatures. They began to pass bubbling pools of mud as the ground rose up to form rocky walls around them. Some were surrounded by little trama thickets. Some hosted bunches of fire ferns, plants with yellow-brown leaves and crimson-and-white flowers that glowed sullenly in the shadow. Occasionally they saw chokeweed clinging stubbornly to life in the rocky soil, stubby evergreen shrubs with grayish stems. Noro heard a kagouti snort in the distance once, and a couple of cliffracers passed overhead casting their long shadows, but not much that was animal lived here.

  
  


The air was still cold here, it was just drier. The mud pools warmed only the area immediately around themselves, and the tangles of trama made it untenable to pass close to them and still make forward progress. Blowing ash began to fall late in the morning, forcing them both to wrap their cloaks about their heads and the lower parts of their faces for protection. No snow would fall here, not even in Sun's Dusk. Red Mountain was not visible from here, cut off from their view by the high gray ridges around them, but it would always make itself known. Noro thought he could see a distant plume of smoke that might be rising from the great volcano, but it was impossible to make out clearly.

  
  


To Noro's surpise, some of the soreness eased as they walked. They ate and drank in the hollow of a stony cliffside, partly shielded from the wind by a trama plant that was probably older than Noro, the vines huge and heavy. They sat on the vines because they were not as cold as the ground. Sahrid kept quieter when there was a risk of ash getting into her mouth. At first he was glad, but over time the haranguing voices in his mind grew louder, and he was shaking with the memory of fear and insignificance when they rounded a bend and nearly walked into a party of four Ashlanders.

  
  


They were clad in chitin armor, cream-colored plates made from the shells of Morrowind's native giant insect fauna glued together with resin. One had a helmet with goggles over it, the long pale crest pointed back over his head like a cliff racer. One wore a purple skirt wrapped over his greaves. All had shawls wrapped over the lower halves of their faces against the ash. They leveled chitin spears at the sudden appearance of strangers. Sahrid held up her hands.

  
  


“Easy, easy, friends! They seek only to pass by on their way, not to do any harm.”

  
  


The Ashlanders looked at one another, then at Sahrid, and he could see them dismiss her –  _a Khajiit, a woman, unarmored –_ as they all looked at Noro. He laid his hand on the hilt of the ebony sword. Four pairs of eyes shifted to stare at the jeweled hilt.

  
  


“Don't try it,” he said. “It'll just be a mess.” It was his tone that did it – without fear, without much interest, only expressing a sort of detached resignation. The Ashlanders looked at one another again and then shuffled over to one side of the path in a line.

  
  


“Thank you kindly, serjos,” Sahrid chirped, and poked Noro in the elbow. He walked past them without a second look. He'd know if anything was about to start by the magicka curling through his bones. Sahrid stuck close behind him, slightly behind his right shoulder so that he was between her and them. He suspected as they moved on through the blowing ash that they were still wondering why he let his slave wander around without bracers.

  
  


_Ha. If one of us is a slave here, it is not Sahrid. If you knew you'd thank your ancestors to be spared from such a dreadful fate._

  
  


Sunset was not seen so much as felt. The ash gradually cleared away and fog rolled in behind it, obscuring any glimpse of the sky. It gradually grew darker near the ground, most noticeable as the blossoms of the fire ferns began to show rings of crimson light around them, as the shadows under the trama grew blacker and blacker. Noro slowed as it got harder to see, pushing back his cloak and shaking the ash off it as he squinted.

  
  


“A torch might be seen. She will guide him. Don't worry, it is not far now,” Sahrid whispered behind him, resting a hand lightly on his shoulder.

  
  


“Oh, good,” Noro said dryly. Touch brought him no comfort. Sahrid touching him increasingly meant someone was going to die. That it hadn't been him yet was merely a coincidence. She tugged at his sleeve as a spire of stone loomed out of the mist. It was just possible to see a face in the darker hollows of the rock, like an old man watching over the trail.

  
  


“We have found the Face of Salto. We will turn to the left here,” she said, still whispering.

  
  


“There's a solid wall there. How?”

  
  


“Not so solid, oh surly friend.” Sahrid reached past him and patted the wall until her hand vanished into a deep shadow that had looked like a mere divot in the rock. “Through there. There are not many ways into the valley.”

  
  


Noro groped forward in the dark until he found the lips of the opening. It was not tall enough to stand up fully at first, the walls pressing close on either side, and then it grew shorter yet and he had to crawl on all fours. He was grateful that he'd never been claustrophobic. It was too dry for the varieties of mushroom that would glow in the dark and show the way forward, so his progress was slowed by his hands occasionally landing on sharper gravel or his shoulder running into a wall as the tunnel curved to one side or the other. The air was close and dense inside the tunnel, not warm but still harder to breathe. It felt like an hour or more before he at last felt a draft of cold air and groped his way out into a trama thicket. It would have been worse if the vines had been young and thorny. Instead he only had to fight his way out through sixty-pound growths of the ancient plant. _How fortunate._ He could hear Sahrid breathing close behind him, footfalls nearly silent as she followed the path that he took. At last he fought his way out, gasping, and was kneeling on the rocky ground looking at a broad valley stretching out below them. At the moment it was largely a bowl of fog, sharp rocks surrounding it on all sides, but from the center rose towers whose stone glistened purple-black in the scant moonlight. Torchlight lit the fog here and there with red. The air felt damper here, and below him he could see grass growing, though it was the brown-red short grass of the borders of Molag Amur. There must be water somewhere below.

  
  


The short hairs rose on the back of Noro Laend's neck as he realized Lanozhakiri was a real place, not a product of Sahrid's insane imagination. Beside him the Khajiit giggled breathlessly with delight, and he could hear her fumbling in her bag. She shoved something that felt soft and slightly oily into his hands.

  
  


“Put on the robe,” she whispered. “We're here at last.” It did not occur to him yet to wonder about the sudden shift to correct grammar in Dunmeris. He laid down his bag, then unbuckled his belts and unbuttoned his cloak so that he could drag the robe on over his tunic and pants. It had been made for someone larger and broader in the shoulders. It was baggy. He buckled everything and the cloak back on over it and dragged enough fabric out over the waistband to keep it from tripping him up, checking that it didn't interfere with his ability to draw his blades. His heart sped up as he made the necessary preparations.

  
  


_This is insane. I am going to die this time, absolutely, without question. My corpse will rot in this valley forever, and that's IF I'm lucky enough that they kill me quickly._

  
  


He could feel Sahrid's eyes on him, watching for weakness, ready to Charm him again if it was the only way to get what she wanted. The thought of any further invasion of his mind, any further interference with his will, made him sick and furious, and that chased the fear back into its hole as he stood up. He drank from the water jar and slung the bag on just one shoulder, so that he could drop it quickly.

  
  


“Walk when she pushes him,” she whispered. “Stop when she pulls. She can see and smell better than he can in the fog, and better than the cultists can, too. There are few betmer who worship this prince. Go.”

  
  


She nudged his shoulder, and he started down the slope into the fog, choosing each step carefully. The last thing he wanted was to slide in the gravel and fall down. Soon he was blind and he might as well have been deaf as well. The heavy vapor muffled sounds. He thought he could hear someone walking in the distance, see a faint flickering light off to their left, but it might have been his imagination as well. He went forward with arms outstretched, pausing to fumble his way around the edges of a great fallen hunk of stone more than once. The surface felt slick and unpleasant under his hands, as if it left some residue of daedric magic behind. Once he heard a slosh and stepped back from a low pool of water. Sahrid tugged sharply on the robe by his shoulder, and he froze, listening. A door opened somewhere up ahead, and he heard the slosh and swish of someone wading through the water. A momenet later a light sprang to life, moving slowly away to their right.

  
  


“Well, she didn't last as long as I hoped,” said a female voice in Cyrodilic, and then laughed, a male voice joining it.

  
  


“Nords aren't as tough as they claim, no matter what Sorni says,” he replied. “But she's bloody heavy, so slow up. Trust me, I don't want to be out in the cold any longer than you do.”

  
  


Sahrid pushed at Noro's back. He waded reluctantly forward into the water. It swirled frigid around his ankles, soaking the bottoms of his trousers and seeping into the tops of his boots to soak his socks as well. It remained shallow, however, and when his questing hands at last found another surface he stepped up onto dry – stone? It felt like a small porch or doorstep, flat and solid. Sahrid leaned past him, and he could dimly see her patting around the swirled stone surface in front of them until she found what looked like a shallow knob of stone hardly different from the rest of the surface. She pushed. An oval section of wall that had looked like an odd decoration slid inward and to the side, a door. The air that blew against his face from inside was warmer. The scent of incense and fresh blood drifted out with a dim red light. He squinted, trying to still the shaking in his hands, and pressed on inside.

  
  


They were on a landing with a stairwell that descended in front of them. The walls and ceiling formed a continuous sort of round tunnel, the walls rough and bumpy in a disturbingly organic way. The scale of it seemed disturbingly large, as though it had been built for beings much taller than a Dunmer to walk two abreast. In here it looked more red than purple. Red light, red stone.

  
  


It felt like being inside a vein, and with the door shut the stink of blood and some dizzying musky incense was stronger. The only thing that made Noro go forward was the fear of the other two coming upon them from behind. Very slowly he drew his shortsword as he squelched down the stairs, cold water squishing the fabric between his toes. The silk-lined scabbard made barely a whisper. Sahrid's hand was still on his back.

  
  


The stairs ended below them in a broad doorway, still arched and round. Sahrid tugged on his shoulder and leaned forward to whisper in his ear, breath hot on his neck and the side of his head.

  
  


“Lay down the bag. When she says go, then he must run.”

  
  


Noro shrugged the bag off his shoulder and set it on the stairs. Behind him he heard a rustle of fabric, then a glugging sound; she was drinking something from a bottle.

  
  


“Go.” As she spoke he felt her hand warm against his back, heat bleeding into his body as power transferred from her to him. It was different this time. There was more. Every sinew quivered with uncanny strength, desperate for release. He no longer feared the battle. He _needed_ it.

  
  


“Take the stones offered on the altar. He should put his back to the leg of the statue if he can. Whatever he hears from the doorway, he must not look until the dremora is dead. Leave the rest to Sahrid. He may nod.”

  
  


He jerked his chin up once, too terrified and furious to speak. So he was to run the gauntlet of a cell of daedric cultists and fight a dremora while she did... what, exactly? Rage buoyed him up as he jerked away from her grip and ran down the last couple of steps.

  
  


The room beyond was vast. At first glance it seemed big enough to swallow the entire Potter's Hall of St. Delyn. Giant censers hung from a hazy, distant ceiling burned with filthy crimson light and gave forth the curling smoke of the inescapable incense. A statue towered in the center of the room. The middle of it was the muscular body of a mer. The upraised hands, the right drawn back as though to strike a blow, were three-fingered, terminating in unnaturally long claws. The grinning face was a pig's face, tusked, big-eared, but also horned like some of the daedra. Molag Bal's legs, each a yard or more thick, ended in giant three-toed feet with claws curling down against the stone floor. The wrap around his waist had a terrifyingly huge bulge in the front of it.

  
  


The dais that held the statue had braziers at its four corners, and between the god's feet the dais held his offerings: a wine bottle, a pair of glowing candles whose white light seemed weak and pathetic against the red glow, a plate holding a small handful of jewels, and something red and not-quite-round that sat in a sticky pool of blood in a clay bowl. Blood spattered the purple-black steps in front of it. A long and well-worn rug woven in a black and gray design lay before Noro's feet, reaching almost to the dais, and on either side of it stood the worshippers, hands uplifted, swaying back and and forth. They were not chanting, but he heard an ecstatic moan in a man's voice as he ran forward toward them. In the dim and awful red light he received the impression of at least one suit of steel armor, one black robe with a hood, but the rest were a blur as the room sped past around him.

  
  


He was moving too fast to even be sure how many there were. He was sure it was more than six. They were just starting to lower their arms to see what had caused the sudden blast of cold air when he slid to a halt on the dais, knocking over a candle. Wax splattered with majestic torpor, incredibly slow as the droplets hovered in the air. He put his back to one of Bal's legs as he leaned down to scoop up the handful of gemstones and hurl them back at the cultists. There was a cry as one of them hit, traveling faster than a thrown rock could ever go, and then he heard a hiss like steam escaping from the largest kettle in the world.

  
  


Noro took two quick steps to the back of the dais. Around the leg of the statue came a black figure in spiny, slick armor, taller and broader than a human, let alone a Dunmer. The dremora's flesh was not black as some humans were called black; it was black as jet, black as obsidian, appearing as hard and smooth as stone. The eyes were flat and slick and glowed red like flame, and there were glowing red markings on the creatures cheeks and brow as well, sharp chevrons that might be painted or might be part of him, it was impossible to tell. Two little horns jutted from his brow, startlingly white against his black skin, and his ears were sharply pointed beneath the slick head of short black hair. A sharp third horn protruded from the daedra's chin. From the neck down he wore a suit of heavy black armor, the pauldrons nearly as big as his head and incissed with a pattern of crimson flame around their edges. The lapped plates of the cuirass had almost an insectile look, a fanged face at the belt, and a red loincloth hung between the sharp stabbing plates of the greaves. In one hand he wielded a mace, its four flanges sharp and cruel, the metal black and glowing with red outlines just like the armor.

  
  


As he spotted the Dunmer he snarled something in a language that Noro did not understand and raised both hands. Noro darted backward, but even now he was not fast enough to avoid the blast of golden-red flame as it blossomed from the daedra's hands into a tremendous sphere. The cloud of fire engulfed not only him, but most of the dais, blinding him with light and heat. After a terrifying instant he realized he was not burning, not even on his bare hands and face. He dropped his shoulder and charged, and the bloom of fire faded in time for him to see the daedra's snarling face before he tried to stab up under one of the plates of the cuirass. The creature responded slowly, obviously surprised, and the shortsword hit resistance but he felt it go through. He clung, trying to shove it further in, hearing the dremora's basso roar in his ears. It seemed to go on for an hour.

  
  


Then a gauntleted hand seized his robe-front and hurled him away as if he had been a scrib. He lost his grip on the hilt, leaving it embedded in cuirass and alien flesh as he flew from the dais and hit the floor in a tight ball. His shoulder and hip hit with bruising impact and he rolled until his head hit the wall, pain so intense that the world went white for a moment. At least, he thought it was a moment. Time had gone all wrong, and when his vision cleared it was still wrong. The dremora still stood on the dais with his arm uplifted as though he had only just finished his throw.

  
  


Noro climbed clumsily to his feet, swallowing against a surge of nausea. Another ball of fire exploded from somewhere _else_ on the platform. He staggered through it and vaulted back onto the dais, hissing in pain as the shoulder he'd hit protested. Pain in his shoulder. Pain in his skull. His right knee wasn't thrilled with events either, threatening to buckle every other step.

  
  


A _second_ dremora was rounding the statue's other foot.

  
  


_Damn you, Sahrid, you said ONE!_ He felt indignant as much as afraid, heart thundering in his ears. The cultists beyond were in the process of turning to look at the dais, but beyond them something rippled in the air, almost impossible to see. It seemed to Noro to be traveling at a normal running speed, which meant it was moving as fast as he was.

  
  


Noro wrenched his eyes away and drew the steel shortsword. The dremora that had knocked him aside was coming up behind him, he could hear the heavy booted feet, but it was not fast enough. He ran forward toward the other one, drawing his tanto. The other had a slightly different pattern of crimson markings, but he was no more helmed than the first one. He carried a heavy two-handed maul of tarnished brass. The head of the weapon was smooth, incised with a geometric design, obviously of Dwemer make.

  
  


Thoughts darted through Noro's pounding head in scattered, panicked fragments. He'd never get through the armor with steel, never. His eyes lit on the creature's unarmored skull. He had no training of any kind and only two days' experience with any sort of combat, but what choice did he have?

  
  


Noro hurled himself forward, dodging to the right at the last moment to avoid the stately down-swing of the maul. He seized the dremora's pauldron for leverage and stabbed at the daedra's temple with the tanto. A blossom of flames died suddenly around the dremora's fingers as the weapon penetrated flesh and bone.

  
  


Noro jerked the tanto upward, and flakes of ice and black-red blood flew in a brilliant arc, ponderous as though weight was no longer a real thing. The dremora started to fall away from him, lips still fixed in a snarl as the tanto slid out the top of its skull. Frost was still blooming around the cut. Tiny bits of hair and gobbets of brain tumbled over and over in midair, the blade clipping off one of the bony horns as it went. It was so much worse than the vampire's death had been. It seemed to go on forever.

  
  


He spun in time to see the other one swinging the flanged mace. Noro ducked and stepped to the right, grabbing at the hilt of the shortsword with his left hand. He felt a puff of air and dust on his right shoulder, hot and stinking faintly of sulfur, and then he yanked at the hilt as hard as he could. The sword came free from under the cuirass plate with a wet _schlirk._ The dremora's scream of pain seemed endless as he staggered, the mace dropping from his hands to fall ever so slowly toward the dais, and then he exploded into dust. Something dark and coherent snapped into a tiny pinpoint and folded itself into the air and vanished.

  
  


Noro Laend stood on the dais with a shortsword in each hand, bruised and shaking but still upright. To either side of him the dust settled. A Dwemer maul lay near his right foot. To his left the daedric mace struck sparks from the dais, bounced upward with dreamlike slowness, and settled again. He stared at the stone in front of him, panting as he listened to long, drawn-out cries of rage. A glance showed the cultists flying at one another. One figure in steel armor was only just drawing his sword from its sheath at a rate of what looked like about an inch per second. The black hood of the person next to him had flown back to show a beautiful young Dunmer, her skin almost blue in its paler grayness, red lips parted in a shriek as she reached for the human in front of her with her hands glowing crimson. He was dressed in leathers and holding an axe whose blade was slick with enchantment, grimacing even as he started to swing it. His greasy black hair hung behind him like a rippling banner as he took a running step forward, seemingly weightless. All of them had blood on their lips and teeth. Either every single one had bitten their own tongue or their ritual had involved drinking it.

  
  


There were eight of them altogether: two so heavily armored that race could not be told, two Dunmer, two Altmer in ornate robes, and two humans, the man with the black hair and a woman whose hair was brown and piled up in ornate braids above her chainmail tunic. He could not see Sahrid at all.

  
  


He started to take a step forward and then his right knee gave in and pitched him onto the stone dais. Noro caught himself on his right elbow in time to avoid hitting his head again. He was looking into the scorched clay bowl at what was now the black and roasted remains of a human heart. Another surge of nausea rose in his aching head, and this time the stink of sulfur combined with the stench of burnt meat in an irresistibly nauseating olor. He barely rolled over in time to throw up off the side of the dais instead of on himself.

  
  


That seemed like it took some time, leaving him weak and breathless, but as he shoved himself back up to his knees to lean on the toe of the statue he saw that the first blows had only just been struck. He was watching the servants of Molag Bal murder each other at what seemed a quarter the speed of normal time. Blood hovered in the air like drifting petals, hair and robes floating around the combatants.

  
  


At the other end of the room two people were just stepping off the bottom of the stairs. Both were Dunmer, a woman clad in plain leathers and a man in dull yellow-brown bonemold armor with the rounded slit-fronted helm of a Redoran. Her eyes were round in shock, mouth open in a small O. As Noro watched, green light blossomed at the shoulder of each. He was able to see quite clearly as the woman's expression changed, brows drawing together as her lips drew back from her teeth. She spun to reach for the man, her fingers glittering green as her tail of black hair flung out to one side ever so slowly. The man was already drawing a steel longsword as he took a step toward her, not even trying to dodge.

  
  


_The thing that she did to me that first time, down in the sewer. She's done it to all of them. Every one._ A chill ran down his spine that had nothing at all to do with the throbbing pain in his head.  _It must not work on the dremora, or she could kill everything in this place without striking a single blow._

  
  


He slumped over to lean against the statue, unable to look away from the slaughter. To cast that same spell on twelve people in a row, and fortify his strength and speed so powerfully that even a daedra seemed slow and weak to him? What _had_ been in the “little vial of useful contents” she had stolen?

  
  


The room wavered in and out with the pounding in his head, and he was weary enough to just let it. He was still watching the frenzied melee when the spell finally wore off. It seemed like it had been hours, but he was nearly certain it had only been minutes. The man with the axe snapped into fast, blurred movement in time for Noro not to have to see him part a Dunmer in a brown robe's head from his shoulders. Body and head fell in opposite directions, thudding to the floor. The big carpet was black all the way along the middle of its length, oozing red at the edges. The stench was so powerful that even the incense could not cover it.

  
  


After that it was over quickly. He saw the man with the axe at last standing alone. He turned in a circle, weapon upraised, stumbling on his blood-soaked right leg. Blood from a cut on his head ran down his face and his leather cuirass. He caught sight of Noro, and for a moment the Dunmer looked into eyes so wide that white showed all around the blue iris. Something in that small personal Hell still reacted at the sight of another living thing. The man turned to stagger toward him, a horrid wordless groaning coming from his foamed and bloody lips, but Noro could see the blood still running freely from a cut in the inner thigh of his greaves. He was dead on his feet. Sheer uncontrollable lust for murder kept him going another several feet before he finally collapsed, twitching. His hands never lost their grip on the axe.

  
  


There was a shuffling footstep near him. Noro glanced up in time to see the hem of a blue velvet robe fade into view.

  
  


“How?” he asked roughly. Sahrid fell to her knees beside him, leaning her head on the statue beside his. A hand groped blindly for his shoulder, and his instinctive attempt to twitch away was too slow. Power rushed through him, blotting out the pain in head and hip and shoulder.

  
  


“Selvyn's Transcendent Frenzy,” she said, her voice small and breathless.

  
  


Noro sat up slowly even as Sahrid slumped over to rest her head on his shoulder. There was not a drop of blood on her robes.

  
  


“I guessed that, idiot,” he said. “You cast it ten times, plus what you cast on you and me. You're not going to convince me you already had that much power.”

  
  


“Oh, he means the Draught of Greater Magicka she borrowed from the temple,” she said. “Too bad there was only one, yes. She is tired now. Go find the sword, there's a good Dunmer.” He tried to push her away and she slithered bonelessly downward, so that he had to catch her to stop her from hitting her head on the floor. Her eyes were shut.

  
  


“You'd better not be faking it,” he said. There was no answer. He shook her. She moved limply, like a child's doll.

  
  


“I could kill you right now and I'd be free,” he said. His own voice was unsteady in his ears. “I would have an ebony sword and a daedric mace, and whatever these bastards were carrying that's valuable. Hells, I don't even have to kill you. I can just collect what I want and leave. Are you going to ignore that, Sahrid?” The Khajiit did not respond. She seemed to be breathing peacefully.

  
  


_And then what?_ The image of bottles and bottles of skooma loomed up in front of his mind's eye, the source of all pleasure and all joy. It would blot out the vampire's mocking echo from his mind. It would fade the memory of blood and pain. It would most of all erase the image of Sahrid's smug damned voice as she explained how she had so easily killed twelve people in a matter of minutes.

  
  


_Would Noro like to be something other than garbage?_

  
  


Yes, damn her eyes. He had not wanted that last week, and he still wasn't entirely sanguine about the possibility of being alive a week from now, but he didn't want to end his days shriveling away in a cave in a sewer any more. He was changing. He was becoming something he had not been before and that he did not understand now. Maybe it was something horrible and broken, but it was something irrevocably different. He could not go back to Vivec and act as though nothing had changed except for the amount of money he had. He did not know what else to do. That left him with Sahrid.

  
  


Noro hauled himself up and gathered her up under the arms to haul her back toward the back of the dais, handling her as carefully as he would a poisonous snake. Without the spell, and tireder than he had thought possible, he did not have the strength to completely lift even a hundred and ten pounds of Khajiit. Sahrid's head hung back at an uncomfortable-looking angle, close-cropped hair brushing the stone. He dumped her on her side, just carefully enough not to hit her head. Then he crossed the huge room, around the remains of twelve people in various stages of electrocution and dismemberment and, he thought in one case, poison – a Nord woman had torn her steel helm off before she died, showing her pinched, greenish face, bloody vomit trickling from the corner of her mouth. Noro could not take his eyes from the dead woman's until his forward path made it impossible to keep looking.

  
  


He found the two bags shoved into a corner on the stairs where they'd left them. He took one over each shoulder and went staggering back, avoiding the squelching rug. The room stank of blood and shit, a smell he thought he would never get out of his nose.

  
  


There were six very ordinary bedrolls laid out behind the altar. Someone had been using a fallen chunk of stone as a table, with candles and scrolls and an inkwell. There were ordinary dishes, a jug of sujamma, and a loaf of sliced bread. _Oh, yes. Have a blood sacrifice to Molag Bal, dispose of the body somewhere in the ruins, and have a meal and a rest back behind the altar to wrap up a successful evening._

  
  


_So there's one thing, I'm not sorry that they're dead._ They had died horribly, and he was sure he would never be able to purge those images from his mind, but they had been murderers even before they felt the maddening touch of Ko'Sahrid's frenzy.

  
  


_Now I'm thinking of her as that. Well I won't, b'vek!_

  
  


 


	6. Chapter 6

Noro dragged Sahrid down the back of the dais, managing with difficulty not to drop her, and then hauled her over to lay her on one of the bedrolls. He set the bags next to her, then knelt down to check that she was breathing. She was obviously deeply asleep, breathing shallowly and slow, but she didn't seem in any sort of physical distress to him.

  
  


_Well, if she dies from drinking her stupid stolen potion it's not my fault, and I'm still free._ It was very cold comfort. He went to get the daedric mace and haul it back over his shoulder. It was as heavy as the weight of guilt, probably forty pound if he was any judge. That should make the walk to their next destination even more enjoyable than it was already going to be, he thought sourly.

  
  


The daedric sword, she'd told him to get it. He thought about refusing just to spite her, but if she had to go look for it when she woke up he'd have to be in here longer than was necessary. He climbed back to his feet, groaning, and went to look around. There were a couple of big wooden chests on one side of the dais that he'd missed. Both were locked. He looked from them to the mess in front of the statue, squinting unhappily. He didn't want to look at the bodies, let alone search them. Sahrid had done it the first time. He had no trouble at all picturing her cheerfully rifling through the pockets of the dead.

  
  


It was that or try to hack the locks off with his swords, and he didn't have an easy way to sharpen his weapons once he'd dulled them. To get a different weapon he still had to go look around the corpses. Noro's shoulders slumped, defeated, and he went to start checking the people in robes first, on the theory that maybe they were higher in rank or something. He turned out to be correct. The decapitated Dunmer had two keys in his pocket. He had a finely crafted amulet around his neck, too, silver with garnets around the edges of a larger central onyx. It was engraved with symbols that he was fairly sure were daedric. He left it lie. He came back with a pocket full of enchanted rings, however. He couldn't tell what any of them did, but they probably had some kind of value, and they were light. His purse wasn't big enough to hold the amount of gold they'd been carrying. He had to take one off the dead human.

  
  


He spent a couple of minutes violently wiping his hands on the cleaner end of the rug before he went back. They didn't feel clean. He wasn't sure they ever would.

  
  


One chest held a small forest of potion bottles of different sizes, all clay painted shades of blue and gray. They had more daedric writing on them. There was a scroll in with them, resting atop a worn copy of a book called _Darkest Darkness_.

  
  


The other chest was longer and narrower. It was padded with black velvet on the inside, and a black cushion cradled the hilt of a longsword in a black and red metal sheath. When he pulled it out a couple of inches, the metal of the thing was black and glistening, almost like ebony, but it was deeply inlaid with sharp-edged, intricate patterns whose look was angular and strange. The symbols inscribed the length of the black blade were filled with something that glowed blood-red, and a single crimson stone glowed from the guard like a malevolent eye.

  
  


_This is the sort of weapon a mer will pay a king's ransom for,_ he thought as he looked down at it. It was a beautiful and a nasty-looking thing; it didn't look like something he'd kill twelve people for. Or one. He sheathed it and hauled it back to Sahrid with the baldric over one shoulder, teeth gritted as he tried not to stumble under the weight. It was even heavier than the mace. He could easily see it being designed for one of the hulking demons he had killed.

  
  


He had killed two dremoras. No one would ever believe him if he told them. It didn't seem important. That had been awful, but not the kind of awful that was watching the cultists tear each other apart. Anyway, you couldn't kill a daedra forever, even he knew that. They'd come back in their own plane somewhere.

  
  


_And it wasn't really me,_ he thought wearily _. Without the kind of fortifying spells that almost nobody can cast, I'm the same useless fetcher I always was._

  
  


Noro paced slowly around the room, trying to listen for the sound of any stragglers in their way in. He felt tired, but the idea of falling asleep in this place full of the stink of blood and shit was no idea at all. He wasn't sure how long that went on, but it must have been more than an hour. Maybe more than four. There was nothing to distinguish one miserable span of time from another except that his legs gradually felt heavier. He picked up the gems from around the altar idly as he went and shoved them into his pockets as well. Some had probably rolled into shadows or cracks where they would never be found, but he eventually collected a diamond as big as his pinky nail and two emeralds of the same size. He shoved them into his other pocket indifferently. Mostly it was something to do.

  
  


Eventually he heard a groan from over on the bedroll. Noro went over to nudge Sahrid with his booted toe. She swatted at his foot.

  
  


“Yes, yes, she is up! Go away!”

  
  


He backed up a step and squatted, bringing himself closer to the Khajiit's eye level. “I found the sword.”

  
  


She sat straight up, ears high and quivering. “What!” She scrambled onto her knees to grab at the hilt, then hauled at it ineffectually for a second before she finally managed to drag it out of the sheath an inch or so. “Haha, yes! Her useful friend has done well. And one of the creatures had a mace, I see. Congratulations, he is once again more well off than ever.”

  
  


“IF we can get both of those to a place that'll buy them,” he said. “I don't know how many people there are that both would see us and have that many thousand drakes.”

  
  


“That is not a problem with the sword. She is going to trade it, not sell it. The mace, yes, that is a harder thing, but she may know someone,” Sahrid said. “In Ebonheart.”

  
  


“And how the hells do you think we're going to get those to Ebonheart?” he asked irritably. “They weigh over a hundred pounds together and it's got to be sixty miles. A couple of Legionnaires could do it, not you and me.”

  
  


“If he does not know the answer to that, he has been paying no attention at all,” Sahrid said. She went over to bite off a hunk of bread, then used a claw to pop the cork out of the wine and poured some of it into one of the clay cups that stood upside-down beside it. She drained it thirstily. “Would he like a glass? It is very fine.”

  
  


Noro grunted and went to try it. It was red and very smooth and slightly buttery. It tasted expensive. It increased his repugnance for the dead cultists yet more that they'd hauled something special out to this place for their blood sacrifice. He declined a second glass. Sahrid shoved it into her bag and drank water afterward, as she rifled the box with the potions in it. She sniffed each one, making a face at a couple of them, and shoved two of the smaller ones into her bag.

  
  


“All right,” she said at last, smacking her lips. “Ugh, the stink of these people. Sahrid will cast the spell on them both, and she will carry the mace because it is lighter and Noro will carry the sword. When both are fast and strong, they should get to Ebonheart much faster than they got here. Would he like to look over the bodies for anything else valuable?”

  
  


“No,” Noro said. “I'd like to be out of this place.”

  
  


“Very well, then. Give her back the robe, since he is done with it. And hold still.”

  
  


She cast the spells with her ears flat, squinting as if it hurt to do so. In another minute they were up and into the fresh, damp air outside the ruin. It was dawn, weak sunlight streaming through the clouds overhead and the fog near the ground. Noro inhaled gratefully as he followed Sahrid back to the thicket of trama to get their bags and start their journey to the West. Sahrid took them by another route than they had come once they had left Molag Amur, but under the spell's influence the grassy landscape seemed to fly by, the sword hardly an encumbrance at all.

  
  


It wore off for the first time as they were approaching a junction of two roads. Noro was squinting through the fog at the rapidly approaching signpost when the sword rapidly started to feel heavier. He heard Sahrid groan beside him.

  
  


“Ugh, so soon? Pause, and she casts again.”

  
  


“Ho there, travelers,” said a voice. Noro looked up even as she rested a hand on his back, his stomach flipflopping at the familiar sensation of magicka flowing into his body. A Nord was approaching them from the road. He wore his hair and beard in greasy yellow braids. He was dressed in yellow-brown bonemold, the pauldrons uneven, his helmet open-fronted and made of iron, and as he walked he rested a heavy steel sword on his shoulder. It looked greenish and greasy with enchantment.

  
  


“Hail, friend,” Sahrid said, continuing to recast on herself. Noro rested a hand on the ebony shortsword, raising an eyebrow.

  
  


“I'm the porter around these parts. I'll be relieving you of anything particularly heavy you might be carrying. Gold, those daedric weapons, whatever you might have.” He was a big man, probably half again Noro's weight even out of armor. Probably most normal travelers would be happy to hand over anything just to get away.

  
  


Noro squinted unhappily, laying a hand on his shortsword.

  
  


“You don't want to do this,” he said. The Nord grinned at him, showing a lot of bad teeth.

  
  


“Oh, but I do. Hand them over or you get a taste of the Paralyzer here.”

  
  


“Alas, they cannot help him with his task,” Sahrid said politely. “They have urgent business in Ebonheart.”

  
  


“Suit yourselves,” he said, and unslung the sword.

  
  


Ten seconds later Noro squatted next to the body, wiping the ebony shortsword on the dead man's padding layer.

  
  


“He's got a heavy purse,” he said dully.

  
  


“Good. Add it to the treasury.”

  
  


They traveled along the road from then on, but they did not reach Ebonheart that day. They slept at a little inn surrounded by rushes, picturesquely situated between the banks of two small rivers. Everyone was very kind and helpful, the Dunmer publican's eyes alight with the gleam of drakes. They ate well, for by that time both were starving; they used the bath house, carrying the daedric weapons with them; and they rented the biggest suite in the place with the dead bandit's money. They even brought a spare mattress up for Noro to sleep on. And best of all, there was a roaring fire, warming the room enough for Sahrid to leave him well enough alone.

  
  


Then, when it had been dark and quiet for hours and Noro was finally asleep, chased through his dreams by bloody cultists trailing strands of intestine, he was awakened by a feeling of murderous, uncontrollable rage. He shot upright from his mattress, wearing nothing but the wrap around his loins, and found another Dunmer in front of him dressed in black silks and holding the daedric mace in his hands. He was fast. He wasn't fast enough. Noro came to himself with blood dripping from his lips and teeth, staring up at the rafters of the room. He lowered his arms – why had he been holding them up? - as he stared up at a heavy ceiling beam. Sahrid's face appeared slowly over one side of it.

  
  


“Has it worn off?”

  
  


Noro looked down. On the floor near where he had been sleeping lay a body with its throat torn out. The dead mer's arm was broken too, bent at an impossible angle between shoulder and elbow. Noro gagged, coughing and spitting. There was a soft thump as Sahrid dangled over the edge of the beam and let go. She was naked, small breasts firm around the sharp pink nipples. She picked up the wine bottle by its neck where it stood on the night stand and brought it over to offer it to him.

  
  


“Well done. She only had to use the one spell.”

  
  


“I told you -” Glug. “Never to do that again!” The last few minutes were a gory blur, but he remembered more than he wished.

  
  


“But surely they are past all that now,” Sahrid said reasonably. “He was armed, and he was quiet. Did you want her to let him stab us both?”

  
  


The desire to strangle her with his bare hands was subsumed only by the desire to wash his mouth out. Noro drank until the bottle was empty, then went to the jug and basin to frantically clean the blood off himself as fast as he could, hands shaking. Behind him he could hear Sahrid rustling around for a robe and calling for the owner of the tavern. She was saying something sharp and annoyed – something to do with how the intruder had gotten the key – but he couldn't care.

  
  


Afterward he remembered the remainder of the journey as an exhausted, miserable haze. The first two times Sahrid touched him, he twitched, waiting for that blinding mad anger to wipe out all conscious thought, but she did not use it again. They encountered bandits twice, once a single Imperial, once a pair of other Dunmer with the accents and garb of Ashlanders.

  
  


The second time the ebony blade seemed heavy in his hand, but it cut through chitin armor as though it were paper. He didn't realize until after it was over, when Sahrid was healing the gut wound caused by a shortsword and the crossbow bolthole in his shoulder, that she had not cast any spells at all on him beforehand. She cleansed him, but the holes in his velvet tunic were probably irreparable.

  
  


“I killed them,” he said slowly.

  
  


“But this is nothing new, Noro Laend,” Sahrid said. She patted him on the shoulder and went to rifle their pockets. “They weren't very good bandits. They're poor.”

  
  


“No, _I_ killed them,” Noro said. “Not you. Not your damned mind control. Not your spells. I. Killed them.”

  
  


“Did she not tell him that she would make him great and powerful? But let him not get too arrogant just yet. These were clumsy, used to robbing fat unarmed merchants. A seasoned warrior would annihilate him.”

  
  


“I'm not arrogant,” Noro said wearily. “I wish I hadn't done it. They look – young.” The shorter of the two looked hardly out of his teens – no, her. It was a woman, he realized as Sahrid nudged her shawl away to check for amulets. Her face had not been particularly soft. She had died with an expression of furious anger that had not yet completely slackened. Noro looked away from it.

  
  


“Pah. The young have as much right to die for their crimes as the old,” Sahrid said. “Come along. They will be in Ebonheart by sunset.”

  
  


Noro stumbled after her. He couldn't even muster the warming fire of hatred now. He just felt beaten, exhausted.

  
  


“Why don't you care about anything?” he asked after a while, quietly.

  
  


“Some of us are blessed with an easy disposition, friend Noro,” Sahrid said, flicking an ear. “She does care about things. Just not very many.”

  
  


“Is the rest of your family the same?”

  
  


“But no. Mother was a cheerful soul, but very irresponsible. Father and siblings are always worrying about some thing or other,” Sahrid said. “Sahrid never worries, but she will not spend all her money on fripperies, either. She is going to fix everything that has gone wrong. Then they will talk to her again.”

  
  


Noro thought as he walked of how dull his life had been before his first taste of skooma. He had never thought he would ever miss it. That was because he had never seen a dead mer with a torn throat stumbling along in the corner of his eye, or a corpse lying in the grass ahead until they got close enough for it to vanish. Staying awake wasn't even enough.

  
  


“They won't talk to you now?” he said, finally parsing something that seemed important out of all of that.

  
  


“Little misunderstandings will happen,” Sahrid said. Noro grunted skeptically.

  
  


Magnus was just a sliver of flame on the Western horizon when they topped a small rise and saw the sea spread out glittering in front of them. Ebonheart was a deeply foreign city, a fortified principality of quarried stone situated on a series of little islands connected by bridges. It was very much in the Imperial style, square parapets walked by Imperial Legionnaires in their steel armor. A broad bridge led from the shore of Vvardenfell to the main square, presently heavily trafficked as people hurried to get in or out before the gate was closed. The masts of many ships studded the harbor, sales furled in their berths. The smell of salt and fish guts drifted toward them on the wind as they approached. Seabirds dove and swooped in great numbers all around the city, calling to one another in their high, eerie voices.

  
  


Noro trod heavily across the bridge, just behind Sahrid's left shoulder. She had run out of power, and they had been hauling the full weight of the daedric equipment for at least a half mile. Up ahead a statue of the dragon-god Akatosh shadowed the square, made entirely of purple-black ebony. Even speckled with bird droppings, it was an awe-inspiring reminder of the Empire's power and wealth.

  
  


The Khajiit seemed to know where she was going, leading him to a small inn down a side street called the Purple Racer _._ It had a crude violet painting of a cliff race on the sign, carrying a blue bottle in its beak. The shadows were long and dark in between the stone buildings. Over time people had built in every available direction so that they were pressed close together, and the upper floors were cantilevered out over the streets as well. Thick diamond-paned rectangular windows in the Imperial style gleamed in the sunset, so different from the smeary green bubbles of glass that were more typical of Hlaalu and Redoran construction.

  
  


The Purple Racer was narrower inside than the previous inn, but the room they rented was the largest it had, taking up the entire width of the top floor. The wood floor was covered with richly colored old carpets, the stone walls with tapestries depicting the Nine Divines worshipped by the Imperials. Noro had a wash in the basin, ate something that tasted like sand that Sahrid pushed in front of him in the taproom, and took one of the pillows and set it on the floor between the bed and the door.

  
  


Sahrid watched him lay out his cloak on the floor as she undressed, cocking an ear at him. He was peripherally aware of the movement. He did not particularly want to see her naked again.

  
  


“Does Noro not wish to sleep in the bed? It will be warmer.”

  
  


“No,” he said shortly. “I'll sleep here, thanks.” If he woke up with her touching him he didn't trust himself not to do something that would result in her enspelling him again, and he felt that his mind would break if that happened. In the event Sahrid shrugged and cheerfully wriggled in under the quilts. After a moment she sat up and tossed an afghan over onto Noro. It smelled faintly of mothballs, but it was warm.

  
  


He'd slept on a hard surface before. That wasn't what disturbed his sleep. He woke at every slightest sound, flailing an arm to try and stop whatever was happening, and then fell back asleep when he realized no one was there. For perhaps the first time, he was awake before she was, trying to stretch out his aching body so that he could walk upright. There had been a time when he did not constantly hurt, but it seemed far away.

  
  


Sahrid slept curled up on her side under the blankets, face tranquil, tail twitching occasionally and moving the sheet. The thought that he could easily leave now did not even occur to Noro this time. He just stared out the garret window at the street and waited for her to wake up.

  
  


That day she strengthened them both, but she insisted that they go to a tailor first, to get him a new tunic off the shelf and order two more to be sent to an address he did not recognize but that was definitely not the Purple Racer. He was only dimly aware of that. He shook the entire time he was being measured, causing the shop mer, a middle-aged Bosmer with flat black eyes, to twitch occasionally and to watch him warily.

  
  


“Serjo, are you all right?” he asked at one point.

  
  


“Oh, do not mind her bodyguard,” Sahrid said, waving a careless hand. She was looking at lace gloves. “He hasn't been getting enough sleep lately. When one is done measuring Noro he may measure her for a couple of new robes and some linens, yes.”

  
  


“There will be a 20% deposit, Sera,” the Bosmer said warily.

  
  


“But of course,” Sahrid said.

  
  


“If I may ask, Sera, how in the world did he get these holes in his tunic?”

  
  


“Well, he is a very good bodyguard,” Sahrid said, smiling at the tailor in a friendly way. “And as Serjo Bothier can see, they are carrying daedric weapons. He has suffered many wounds on Sahrid's account. He is a strong mer, very fast, very hard to kill. One could not ask for better.”

  
  


Unexpectedly Noro felt a small kindling warmth in his chest.

  
  


_One could not ask for better._

  
  


He relaxed slightly, straightening his spine. He realized how pathetic that was, but it was _something._ It was the first nice thing someone had said about him in... Well, in a long, long time.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Noro left the shop clad in a new tunic made of serviceable blue wool embroidered about the hems with a pattern of white trama thorns, a thing rapidly altered down from an item someone else had returned. His hair was clean and in good order and tied back with a blue ribbon. He wore the same trousers and boots as he trudged after Sahrid, hauling the mace over one shoulder with both hands and the sword on its baldric hanging over his shoulders. Passing people, more Imperials than he had ever seen together, stared at the Khajiit in her blue velvet robe and the Dunmer hauling his heavy and valuable burden. Sahrid seemed to expand from the attention, puffing out her chest as she sashayed up the street.

  
  


It occurred to him, as she led him uphill from the faintly fish-scented docks district toward a better part of town, that perhaps she had come up with words of praise so that he would be better disposed to her suggestion that he carry both weapons so she would have her hands free. With strength applied to him they weren't so bad to hold, but to carry them uphill for twenty minutes was enough effort to notice, and she clearly did not want to go to her next appointment out of breath. At least he'd managed to hold still while she cast it on him. That was a small victory.

  
  


The cobbled street was no wider as they turned aside, but the surface of it was smoother and better maintained, weeds pulled from the gutters as they had not been in the main thoroughfares. The buildings were still pressed wall-to-wall down the street and around the square up ahead, but they were cleaner, the moss scrubbed out of the masonry near the ground and the eaves free from nesting birds. Increasingly they had small plaques on the doors with writing in Cyrodilic, not the hardy painted signs that could be understood regardless of literacy or language. Noro could not read them. He could understand spoken Cyrodilic. Sometimes. If it wasn't too fast.

  
  


That being the case, he did not understand much of Sahrid's conversation subsequently. She went into a front that looked just like all the others to him. There was a secretary at a desk, a young brown-haired Imperial in a green woolen robe, black tunic, tights, and shoes with the toes turned up. He spoke to Sahrid impassively for a moment, and Noro thought he was saying something about not having an appointment. Sahrid beckoned him forward, and he did understand her words because she spoke them slowly and clearly.

  
  


“Noro, the sword.”

  
  


He slipped the baldric off his shoulder and hauled the thing up onto the desk with a _thud,_ scattering some papers. The secretary stared at it, blinking, then got up and went rapidly up the stairs. A moment later he came back down to lead them upward, Noro gritting his teeth as he hauled everything up after Sahrid. The upper landing was covered in red and brown rugs with gold tassels, finer religious tapesetries than the inn had had. A couple of the diamond-paned windows looked out the back of the building onto a little grassy plaza. They went into a room to the right of the stairs that proved to be a large office full of bookshelves and cabinets, and in the center of it stood a vast desk. Behind it sat a silver-haired Imperial, a man with the slightly swollen and veinous nose of someone probably overly fond of his brandy. He seemed sober enough as he stood to greet them, speaking Dunmeris.

  
  


“How do you do. Berius tells me you have a daedric blade you are interested in selling to a collector.”

  
  


Noro looked at his hip curiously. He was clad in black and gold velvet, tunic, vest and tights, but he did have a light rapier hanging from his belt. He was sturdily built and slightly overweight, but he didn't look like someone who would easily swing the longsword. He shrugged and laid it on the desk. The Imperial leaned forward, reaching, then looked up at Sahrid. She nodded.

  
  


“By all means, inspect it closely. She is not here to sell. She instead wishes to trade.”

  
  


“Trade,” the man snorted. He slid the sword from its sheath, slowly and with obvious effort, and whistled softly as he saw the glowing runes. “What in the world do you want to trade for something like this?”

  
  


“There is a property that you own which is not in use,” Sahrid said. “It was mortgaged and then defaulted some time ago. It has little value, and the building is in need of work. Test it, Serjo, it is incredibly sharp.”

  
  


“You will have to be more specific, Sera.” The Imperial dropped a hair over the blade, watching it fall in two. Then he tried it with a small piece of paper. It slid neatly into matching halves. “Good gods. It's perfect. Just the thing I've been looking for.”

  
  


“It is called Trammelwood, or it was once,” she said. “It is a little North of here, on the mainland. There is a silver mine which was exhausted years ago, and a hundred acres of wooded property surrounding it.”

  
  


“Oh, of course. Why in the world would you want that old place? There's barely a garden, nothing there to allow it to support itself, and now the building needs so much work it's going to be a vampire for drakes for years to come,” he said. “I'm happy to part with it, of course, but I wouldn't wish you to be unaware of what you are purchasing.”

  
  


“She knows,” Sahrid said. “It is Trammelwood that she wants.”

  
  


“Very well. I'll call Berius and we'll get the paperwork done.”

  
  


There followed a long, boring hour of discussion of things Noro understood little and cared about less. He stood near the window of the office looking out, the mace resting on his shoulder. The Imperial, who it developed was called Morius Deletian, apparently already had one in his collection; he mentioned regretfully that it was too bad it wasn't an axe instead.

  
  


Not much was happening in the green yard with its little basin of pink and yellow flax, hardy late-season flowers not yet ploughed under for the winter. There were stone benches to either side of the basin, and a small arbor to one side covered with a healthy, flourishing ivy vine. It looked quiet down there. Peaceful. Noro realized that he had not been alone for more than a few minutes since Sahrid had first slipped into his little cave under Vivec. He had not missed it, but now he was starting to think that it would be nice to go and sit quietly in a green place. He had never wanted that in his life that he could recall. But then, he'd spent most of his life in Vivec. All of the plants were in pots.

  
  


“Come along, Noro,” Sahrid said. He turned away from the window and slouched after her. She was carrying a book under her arm with a latch on it. The Imperial was still talking to his secretary behind them, showing off his new sword.

  
  


“She supposes he wishes to know why she wants this particular property,” Sahrid said.

  
  


“Did your family own it?” Noro asked.

  
  


“But yes! She was born there. It was beautiful then and it will be beautiful again. Sahrid and Noro will have to do some more traveling before that can happen, of course. Friend Morius is not wrong, it will need a great deal of expensive work. Now come along, let us go and sell the mace and open him an account.”

  
  


“Do what?” he asked.

  
  


“A bank account, a place to keep your money, silly. Having it not all in front of you will keep you from spending it stupidly,” Sahrid said. “Mace will probably bring twenty thousand, more than you can reasonably carry in your purse. That, and how much are you carrying now?”

  
  


“Probably five or six thousand, counting the value of the rings from the cultists,” he said. _Did she just start using you and your?_ But in the next sentence she had gone back to the “typical” Khajiiti disregard for Dunmer grammar.

  
  


“Probably he should put away some of those drakes, too. They can earn interest for him.”

  
  


“How?”

  
  


Sahrid shot him an amused look. “He puts money in an account. The bank takes it and lends it to people who need to buy land, or a shop, or a fishing boat, big things. Those people pay back over time, and they pay a little fee for the loan, which is also called interest. There are lots of them, so the bank has lots of money even though the loans are paid back slowly. But the bank needs money to lend, so they pay you for the use of yours.”

  
  


_There it was again._

  
  


“How do I know they'll have mine when I need it, then?” he asked.

  
  


“They must always give it back when it is withdrawn, or people would stop giving them money. When a bank has existed a long enough time you can usually trust that they will,” she said. “Unless something terrible happens and everyone tries to take all their money out at once, and then the juggling act falls down. But that happens perhaps once in a person's lifetime.”

  
  


“Huh,” he said. “Well, you're right that I don't need to be carrying it around.” _And I don't want it in your reach either, when you've just bought a house that even the seller admits is a money pit._

  
  


The someone that Sahrid knew turned out to be located down a much less fancy little street, very narrow and smelling of cooked cabbage and lye soap and the tantalizing faint scent of skooma. A couple of young men loitered around the doors of a narrow tavern jammed in between a laundry and a grocery shop. Sahrid took the mace into a little shop that announced itself as a cobbler and came back out with a bag of drakes and a pair of new boots.

  
  


“Here, these are for you. It was in fact eighteen thousand,” she said. “Apparently some people recently looted parts of Ald Sotha and flooded the market for maces locally. We will have to go further afield. Put new boots on, yes. The old ones look disgusting now.”

  
  


He grunted indifferently. He suspected she had just pocketed two thousand drakes, but it wasn't like he needed that much money. Having more would not free him from the small personal Oblivion of being leg-shackled to Sahrid.

  
  


The suede of the old boots was permanently stained from the gore of Lanozhakiri, beyond even Sahrid's spell's ability to clean it. The new ones were sturdier black-dyed leather with rawhide laces, coming to his knees, and apparently Sahrid had correctly guessed at his size; they fit surprisingly well.

  
  


“People get murdered for boots like this,” he said as he tied them up. “Especially in neighborhoods like this one.”

  
  


Sahrid laughed. “Really? Then they had better move on, before Noro happens to someone. He doesn't want to have to slay any youthful miscreants.”

  
  


“No, I do not,” Noro said. He was not laughing as he tossed the old boots into an alley and followed Sahrid back out toward the main streets. It was a relief to be free of the weight of the mace. Twenty thousand drakes were heavy, but not as heavy as that. He carried the grubby canvas sack over his shoulder, as if it were dirty laundry. It felt as if there were probably a couple of bags in there for reinforcement. “Where are we going now?”

  
  


“Bank. Then to see her sister and brother and tell them the good news,” Sahrid said. “Malurai and J'sulo have a little shop in Green Street with the artisans.” Her tone was faintly derisive. “Grub for drakes fixing stupid people's broken arms. Sometimes J'sulo goes on trip for weeks only so he can teleport some rich merchant back to Ebonheart, yes. He has only the two spells.” She thought about that. “Unless he has found a way to learn another one in the last five years. That is possible, she supposes.”

  
  


Noro grunted again. He wanted to argue with her tone, but he was in no position to argue the virtue of honest work, because he had always hated doing it. Of course, doing magic work in a nice shop was probably different from hauling buckets of compost to the planters in the Plazas. Even now, though he ardently wished himself somewhere else, he did not want to go back to the kind of life he'd had before skooma. He saw only dull gray behind him, and he could not wish for it more than the throbbing red present.

  
  


The bank was, expectedly, boring, a gray stone building full of stone-faced steel-armored guards and very polite people in velvet robes, but at least he was relieved of the weight of most of his drakes. _Weight, that's all it is. Once I would have killed for –_

  
  


He snorted as he followed Sahrid out of the bank.

  
  


_Oh yes. I have._

  
  


He tried to pay attention to their route in case he should find himself alone in Ebonheart, but it was hard to focus on it. He could never completely divert his attention from whoever was around them, eyes on every weapon, twitching at every sudden movement. When they finally stood in front of a narrow shop-front, he was not perfectly sure how they had come there. The painted sign showed the image of a toppled goblet spilling red liquid, which he dimly recognized as a symbol of one of the Imperials' gods, but he'd no idea which one or what it meant. Sahrid waited by the door until he realized what she wanted and went to open it. He followed her inside in time to see the woman behind the counter tap her first against her chest, golden magicka rippling out around her hand and vanishing.

  
  


She looked nothing at all like Sahrid, Noro thought as he shut the door behind him. In fact, though her features were more feline, Sahrid was prettier. The woman in front of him was short, sturdily built, but not particularly buxom; her forearms were muscular and her chest was either very flat or bound very tightly by her clothing. She had a round, flattish face and narrow, pointed eyes, her skin light brown. Her skin was painted or tattooed on her cheeks and brow with a darker brown pattern suggesting spots and stripes, and the markings extended down over her neck into her brown homespun collar, out of her rolled sleeves and down to the backs of her hands. She wore her black hair bound up in a messy bun.

  
  


She had Sahrid's yellow eyes. They looked particularly strange in such a different face.

  
  


The ohmes stood behind a wooden counter the length of the room, with a gate at one end that would flip up to allow her in or out. In front of it there were a couple of long wooden benches against the walls. Behind it there were shelves lined with bandages, jars of herbs Noro did not recognize, neatly laid out tools of steel lying on velvet.

  
  


Sahrid greeted her in Cyrodilic. She responded in Dunmeris. Noro realized that in fact she had pointed catlike ears on top of her head, lightly furred in tan; they were so flat that they were almost invisible.

  
  


“Why are you here, Sahrid?” Her eyes shifted to Noro and back, narrowing; he was very aware of the shift from face to shortsword to face again. “What do you want?”

  
  


“Malurai is being rude,” Sahrid said. “This is Noro Laend, her bodyguard. Noro Laend, this is Malurai, who is sister to Ko'Sahrid. She presumes J'sulo is working - ”

  
  


“Drop it,” Malurai said flatly. “Do you think I've forgotten what languages you speak, and how well?”

  
  


“Ah, well, since it's just us,” Sahrid said, waving a hand dismissively. Noro stared at her. She flicked an ear. Her expression of calm cheer did not change, not a twitch of the tail, but he received the impression she was annoyed. “But there's no cause for acrimony, dear. For that matter, fortifying yourself with spells the instant you see me is very hurtful. I've come bringing good news.” Her voice still had a faint purring undertone to it, but the accent was almost completely gone; her grammar was as good as anyone Noro had ever heard. Better than his, probably.

  
  


“Yes, I'm sure it would be very convenient for you if your charm still worked,” Malurai said. “What news?”

  
  


“I have the deed to Trammelwood,” Sahrid said. “I own it outright. We can go home!”

  
  


Malurai gave her a weary look, one ear lifting to half-mast. “I don't believe you. And if I did, Trammelwood hasn't been home for years and years. It'll be a wreck by now.”

  
  


“Nothing that can't be fixed, I am assured,” Sahrid said. “I thought you might be skeptical, so I've brought it with me.” She took the roll of parchment from her bag, but the ohmes held up an arresting hand.

  
  


“I don't care. I'm not giving up everything I've built here to go be your lackey out on the old place, Sahrid,” Malurai said. Her ears relaxed more or less upright, but she continued to watch them both closely.

  
  


“No one's asking you to do any work personally,” Sahrid said, tucking the roll away. “I just wanted you to know that if you want to come back, you can. Always. I can make it at least liveable now, but when I've gone out to earn more against the repairs there will be someone there who can let you in. I just want you to know that.”

  
  


“Thank you,” Malurai said. “I'll be sure and tell J'sulo when he's come back from Balmora. Is that all?”

  
  


“That's all,” Sahrid said, raising her hands placatingly. “I can't stay to chat in any case. I still have to hire a driver before nightfall. My respects to Father, when you see him. Say goodbye, now, Noro.”

  
  


He shot Sahrid a look of unconcealed loathing, nodded curtly to the ohmes, and went to hold the door. She jerked her chin at him, and again he saw her eyes flicker to the ebony shortsword and back.

  
  


It was a long ride behind a heavy bull guar from a stable outside of Ebonheart on the shore. They sat in a light four-seated chaise behind an Imperial driver as they rode out. The scaly two-legged beast probably weighed nearly a ton, its enormous toothy maw open slightly to reveal a fat pink tongue as it pulled, tiny ridiculous arms pushing at its harness. It was light tan in color, like many of Vvardenfell's native guar. Noro sat as far forward as was physically possible, hand resting on the seat back in front of him as he looked around them. He misliked the high hood that kept him from looking back. The road was narrow and rough, and this near the water there were not only mushrooms, but trees and brush clustering near the verges. The skeletons of the leaf-bearers might hide nothing, but there was the odd import conifer as well, green and dense year-round. There were many comberries, heavy with their winter crop now that they were no longer in easy walking distance of Ebonheart. He heard sounds that he recognized as distant cliffracers, but otherwise the cart's wheels seemed loud in the rustling whisper of the trees.

  
  


“There won't be anything to worry about out this way, Serjo,” the driver said, glancing over his shoulder. “This road's not traveled often enough to attract bandits, and the smell of the guar will scare off most animals. I understand there are nix hounds in the hill country around the estate, if you should want to go hunting for meat.”

  
  


“Still the nix hounds? Hooray!” Sahrid actually clapped her leathery palms together. “They will have a hunt this winter, as in the old days.” The thick purring accent was back, and had been since the first time she spoke to anyone outside Malurai's shop. “Fresh hound steak is the very best thing, braised with some salt and a kwama egg – is there still a wild nest five miles West of the house, does Rellian know?”

  
  


“It's still there, Sera,” the Imperial said. “Locals sneak in to harvest eggs or larvae around there every so often, but the hive's going strong.”  
  
“Well, they shall not want for food this winter,” Sahrid said happily. “She will see if she can collect a couple of eggs tomorrow, perhaps – look, Noro, there it is!”

  
  


He followed the direction of her pointing claw and saw that they were topping a small prominence. The trees fell away in front and below to reveal a broad lawn stretching out toward a vast stone manor house in the Imperial style. It had a large central section with a wing stretching out to each side. The yard was overgrown to the point that there were three-foot mushrooms growing in parts of it, the grasses brown but still standing at this cold time of year. There was what appeared to be a hedge maze in front of the Western wing, probably impassable now, and on the East side of the weedy cobbled drive there was a walled garden, similarly wild.

  
  


“The grounds are in sad disrepair,” Sahrid said, leaning to the right of the driver to try and get a better look. “It used to take six gardeners to maintain them. She will have to hire someone to start clearing it up as soon as possible.”

  
  


“I'd worry about the inside first, Sera,” said Rellian. “Some of the old furnishings are still there, from what I've heard – at least the ones that were too heavy to easily move - but the place will be very dusty. If any of the windows are broken rot might have got at the tapestries.”

  
  


“They have been camping outdoors for nearly a week,” Sahrid said, grinning. “They can cope with some dust and rotten tapestries, yes. As long as a chimney still draws they shall consider themselves very comfortable.”

  
  


Noro felt uneasy as they drew nearer, but he had felt uneasy for roughly the last three days, and the house wasn't worse than anywhere else they'd been. It probably had no vampires in it, so that was something to look forward to.

  
  


“Let me go first, once it's unlocked,” he said.

  
  


“But of course,” Sahrid said. She patted him reassuringly. He shuddered but managed not to jerk away this time. He did not particularly care if anything happened to Sahrid. In fact, on one level he desperately wished that something would. The trouble was that he also had no illusions about his own ability to survive without her spells. And if he did somehow survive, the business of slaughter would be slow and messy and ugly instead of... fast and messy and ugly. At least then it was over sooner.

  
  


Noro waited while Sahrid unlocked the door, then stepped forward to shove at the heavy wooden portal. He stepped inside with his hand on his sword. The vestibule seemed vast and cavernous in its emptiness, innocent of furniture, decorated only with cobwebs and a thin layer of dust stirred by his feet. A great stair of some dark polished wood led up to a second story with a balcony spanning the width of the room. Doors led off to left and right as well as straight ahead under the overhang, though he could only tell these by the gleam of the tarnished brass knobs. There was no smell of blood or excrement or fire or smoke suggesting the presence of anything but the occasional insect.

  
  


“I think we're all right,” he said.

  
  


Sahrid went back out to pay off the wagoner. Noro's ears strained to catch the sound of retreating wheels until it was no longer possible. Sahrid walked up beside him, leaving the door open to admit the last of the day's thin light. She grinned into the dim, teeth gleaming.

  
  


“Ah, but it's not so bad, my friend. They will have little trouble making it habitable again. Come, we will gather wood first and spend our first night in the kitchen by the hearth. She used to go in and beg the occasional sweetroll from Cook when she was a kitten, yes. How wonderful to be home!”

  
  


They did indeed spend the next hour collecting as much loose wood as they could find. It was boring, tiresome work, and Sahrid's cheerful chatter denied him the silence that would at that point have been a welcome relief. Time and again she led him through the vestibule and into the first door on the right, into a kitchen that seemed to him big enough to feed an army. There was a big counter in the middle that must weight hundreds of pounds, probably too heavy to move and therefore never sold off. Other counters lined the walls. On one side there was a vast hearth with a furnace full of shelves for baking, and beside that a more conventional fireplace holding an ancient corroded spit. A less obtrusive door led out to the side of the building where the woodpile was.

  
  


In fact, when they were done and Noro went out to look for the well, he found there was still a fair amount of wood still there, not valuable enough to be worth hauling away. He felt a bit annoyed by that after dragging fifty pounds of odds and ends and twigs and logs all the way from the yard. The well was out beyond the kitchen door, its little round roof still intact. He peered down into it, but couldn't see anything. There was a rope, but the bucket had gone. In the end they ended up tying the rope cunningly around the two handles of a very heavy old pot and using that as a bucket.

  
  


Sahrid found a couple of candle-ends for him to light from the fire when he needed to go to the privy. There were apparently a few inside the house, cobwebbed but still functional; the pipes led down to a small sewer dug far under the house and accessed by outside storm doors. The privies had all been blocked up with wads of rags when the house was left empty to prevent rodents from getting up them, and unblocking the one nearest the kitchen was a less odoriferous task than he had feared, but he was glad enough to go out and wash under the kitchen pump. There, at least, Sahrid did not follow him. They slept in their cloaks on the kitchen hearth. Noro woke often, blood and horror passing in front of his eyes, and was still tired when the sun came in through the heavy shutters of the kitchen window.

  
  


The next day Sahrid dragged him all over the house, excitedly showing him a lot of large dusty rooms that had apparently seen a great deal of childhood exploits that probably revealed a bit more than Sahrid intended, as when she poked her head into a nook under the narrow kitchen stairs leading up to the upstairs servants' hallway:

  
  


“And this is where she would hide and jump out and scare J'sulo when he was a kitten. It worked for years. She could still make him twitch by saying BOO when he was sixteen, ha ha! Eventually he learned telekinesis well enough that she couldn't get away before he threw things at her.”

  
  


And as she showed him the banisters of the upstairs landing:

  
  


“She used to slide down the banisters. Malurai did too, but she was stupid and did not wait until nobody was looking and then we got in trouble. So I daubed hound pheremones on her shoe and a male almost ate her. Nobody ever found out it was me, of course.”

  
  


These little slippages of her accent happened more as she talked about the past. He wasn't sure why she was even maintaining the pretense now that he knew it was false. Perhaps it was habitual. Noro had to do nothing more than nod and grunt acknowledgement to keep her happy. If she noticed that he was less chatty and argumentative than when they had first met, she either did not care or preferred him thus.

  
  


 


	8. Chapter 8

The next several days were spent cleaning and carrying. Noro unblocked all the privies and poured a slurry of lye from an outbuilding down them, cleaned the chimneys, stocked every one of more than a dozen fireplaces, found an old axe and cut and carried more wood. He swept. Sahrid mopped after him. He slept poorly when he slept at all. Some nights he took a candle end and went down to work on cleaning out the root cellar with a broom and a shovel instead. It was quiet. They'd found a hidden stash of candles behind a small pile of coal down below, by the main boiler that was meant to heat water for the indoor plumbing found upstairs.

  
  


Their new clothes arrived the second day. His old ones, once very fine, were now reduced to stained and damaged work clothes. He washed them and hung them to dry by the fire at night, tying his cloak around his waist.

  
  


The fourth day after their arrival, a cloudy and chill Sundas, Sahrid left him to empty and clean the water tanks on the roof and started off for a small village nearby called Tarrow to try and engage some help. Noro was at that point moving about in a nightmarish haze, requiring that instructions be repeated two or three times before he understood him. Sahrid chided his stupidity and told him he should be getting more sleep. He was glad when she left. It was the first time she had been out of his sight or hearing almost since they'd met.

  
  


She came back with a family of four mud-brown Argonians whose value may have been their cheapness to hire, or may have been that they had their own guar and wagon, or both. The wagon was full of sheets and curtains and brooms and buckets and other such sundries as could reasonably be purchased in the village; he gathered she had almost cleaned out the single shop. Apparently Talks-Just-So and his wife Seretei had been staying with her parents and were more than thrilled to have their own home, even if it was the rundown lodge out by the property's back gate. There was a pond and a steam out there that had not been fished for years, and that promise might have lure them as well. They had two children, both older boys, whose names Noro did not retain. They were wary to see a Dunmer, but Noro was polite enough on introduction and ignored them in favor of his own work thereafter. Sahrid helped them clean out the lodge as she sent him to continue working on cleaning the vast and empty mansion. He was given paper and charcoal to write an inventory of anything he found.

  
  


Most of the wooden bedsteads had apparently been too heavy to easily move, along with a couple of settles near the larger fireplaces, an enormous table in the big dining room off the kitchen (but no chairs), a buffet table in the same place, and a wardrobe in the vast master suite upstairs that was big enough to use as a house. Everything was in the Imperial style: square or rectangular construction, flat ceilings everywhere but the vestibule, square transparent windows with heavy storm shutters on the outside. Noro found himself writing indecipherable scribbles more than once, or standing staring at a plastered wall with no memory of the last few minutes. Sometimes he was almost certain he fell asleep standing, but it was never enough to really feel rested.

  
  


That evening Talks-Just-So killed a couple of scrib out in the wood and Seretei cooked them. Noro found himself more or less unable to converse until Sahrid took him aside and said something he did not afterward remember. He remembered only the warmth of her hand and that afterward it seemed the most natural thing in the world to comfortably chat with them all. Probably some of what he said was nonsense. When everything was cleaned up and they were on their way back to the main building, stomachs full, Sahrid said,

  
  


“Noro, you nearly embarrassed her back there. He must not be unkind to the staff. It looks bad, and we want them to take good care of the place while we are gone.”

  
  


“I'm sorry, Sahrid,” he said, and then wondered at himself. He did not remember ever apologizing to her before, but it surely was the right thing to do. Sahrid had always been so kind to him. He should be treating her better than he did. “I'll do my best.” He looked up at the black sky full of stars, at Secundus waning from gibbous and Masser nothing but a black mass, a new moon. “It's a lovely night,” he suggested, words slurring slightly.

  
  


“Indeed it is,” Sahrid said. “On just such a night as this she was born. Noro will carry some water up to the rain tanks so that she can have a real bath tonight, and then he may have a wash out at the pump and go to bed. He would not be so grouchy if he were getting more sleep. Maybe he just needs to work a little harder.” She patted him on the shoulder, again filling him with sudden warmth.

  
  


Noro laughed. Sahrid was so funny and clever. He couldn't believe he'd never noticed it.

  
  


“Of course,” he said.

  
  


Sahrid hauled a straw mattress up to the master bedroom to lay on the vast bedstead, put clean sheets on it, and plumped up the best pillow she had been able to procure in the village, then lit up the fire. At least, Noro was relatively certain she had done so because that was the state of things when she called him in to see the water running into the old clawfooted tub. The master bath was tiled in a lovely aqua blue color with a big clawfooted tub, presently uncurtained, and a white porcelain sink, again in the Imperial style. The brass fixtured gleamed anew, showing the time they'd spent polishing them.

  
  


“Behold, the result of his hard work,” she said. He was exhausted and covered in sweat from hauling the pot up all the stairs time and again, but he still grinned at that, panting. It was worth the incredible pain in every muscle of his body to see her smile at him. “Now shoo, go wash up and go to bed.”

  
  


His clothes smelled even after he washed them, so he left them in a bucket with some lye soap. By the time he had himself mostly clean – he didn't remember all of that process, and at least once he found himself staring at nothing – he was starting to feel less chipper. Had he really apologized to Sahrid? He staggered upright, naked except for the cheap sandals he now wore for cleaning, and stumbled back into the kitchen, hair tied into a knot behind him as best he could. He was shaking and was not sure why for a couple of minutes as he dressed in the simplest of his new clothes, the off-the-shelf woolen tunic and trousers. He poked up the fire clumsily.

  
  


What was wrong? It hadn't been a bad day. They'd worked all day, and that was boring, but it wasn't worse than what he'd done before he'd met Sahrid. Then they'd gone to dinner and... and...

  
  


What the fuck had _happened_ at dinner? He hadn't been himself. He wasn't sorry he'd been friendlier to the Argonians, but how had he ever done it when he was so tired he kept falling asleep standing? He knew himself better than that. How had he ever agreed to haul water for a half-hour so Sahrid could have a godsdamned fancy bath?

  
  


_She charmed me. Twice, she charmed me twice,_ he realized, freezing where he stood with a poker in his hand in front of the fire. Warm hand on his shoulder, warmth spreading through his body as the magicka took hold _._ He felt sick, guts churning, and for a minute he thought he was going to lose his dinner, but then he started to get dizzy. He shoved the poker back into its holder and groped for the cloak on its hook between the fireplace and the oven, but his hands touched only stone and then he was leaning hard on it, sliding downward. His legs suddenly felt made of mud, completely unresponsive; but even then he could still feel his hands shaking as they flopped against the hearth. 

  
  


Images flew past his eyes, backward in time: dead bandits. Dead thief, throat torn out. Dead cultists. He knew what was coming next but was powerless to stop it now as he had been powerless to stop it then:

  
  


_**What sort of little mer are you?** _

  
  


He heard it as clearly as he had heard it then, felt that paralysis as clearly as he had felt it then. Noro slumped downward against the wall, but there was no one to set the beast on fire now. Sahrid no longer needed him close by. He made a strangled noise, fear choking the sound in his throat. It was a relief when the room started to fade in front of his eyes, deep dark silence pushing the horror away.

  
  


Sahrid slept well on her new mattress with a hot brick at her feet. It wasn't good enough, not even close, but it was a start, and it was certainly better than sleeping on the ground. She was in a good mood as she dressed in one of her new robes, a handsome crimson velvet with a rich black satin lining. The house was clean, she had engaged four inexpensive groundskeepers who would be starting on the long dirty task of cleaning up the gardens today, and now she could sleep warm without the necessity of cuddling up to a surly Dunmer with a long bony naked face. She was a little annoyed to find him slumped over by the dead fireplace in a position that surely could not be good for his neck, head fallen onto his shoulder. She poked him.

  
  


“Time to get up, Noro Laend. They are going into Ebonheart today, yes. There are supplies they need to get for the groundskeepers and things they need for their next journey.”

  
  


He did not respond or open his eyes. She squinted at him carefully, but he was still breathing, just very shallowly. Sahrid poked him again, this time extending a claw slightly. Nothing. He didn't respond to that or to shaking him vigorously, or to healing or curing, or even to her Charm, though that made him stir and tremble a little for some reason. She sighed in annoyance, took down his cloak to wrap him in it carefully, and laid him on his side; then she went to get Talks-Just-So. She was nothing if not tenderly concerned as they loaded him into the guar-drawn wagon and started off for town. It wouldn't do to look indifferent in front of the servant, who above all things must think well of her when she was gone. Noro Laend did not budge in the slightest on their journey, though she occasionally poked him in the guise of checking on him in case he was faking it.

  
  


Sahrid left him sitting in the wagon in front of the little shop as she went inside. She had to wait behind an Imperial woman who had a child with the sniffles as Malurai healed it. Today she was wearing boring homespuns as usual, but this time with a slightly less dowdy shade of blue on her tunic. Sahrid wondered if she squished her breasts flat on purpose. She remembered her being more attractive than that. She'd been quite envious for a little while when she was nineteen and Malurai was sixteen.

  
  


“Sahrid,” Malurai said, in a weary tone that quite annoyed her, though she chose not to show it. “What do you want now?”

  
  


“There is something wrong with her bodyguard, Noro Laend,” Sahrid said. “He will not wake up. She is terribly worried for his health.”

  
  


“You can heal and cure,” Malurai said. “What do you think I'm going to do that you can't? And you may as well drop the act, nobody can hear you but me.”

  
  


“I have the power, yes,” Sahrid said patiently. “But I don't spend my time day in, day out looking at sick people. I don't know what's actually wrong with him. I'm hoping you will. He can pay you well, you know. I've brought his purse.” She plunked the heavy little leather bag down onto the counter. “I don't have time to fuss with him. I've got things to do today. Do what you can for him, take the drakes, and if he dies, you did your best. What do you lose?”

  
  


“I'm sure he'd be very touched by your concern,” Malurai said dryly.

  
  


“So I can bring him in, then?” Sahrid asked, giving Malurai her most winsome smile. Her sister rolled her eyes.

  
  


“Yes, yes, bring him. I've got a couple of beds in the back room for overnight patients.”

  
  


“You are an aedra of mercy,” Sahrid said sweetly, and went to wring her hands as Talks-Just-So carried Noro in over one brawny scaled shoulder and back behind the counter and laid him on a bed in the back room. Sahrid left him at market with instructions to meet her later and rode off to her day's shopping without a care in the world, already planning her next conquest. It would be inconvenient if she had to train another bodyguard so soon, but after all, now she had a home and a little money. The Argonians had agreed to a small sum in advance and their board and hunting until she could pay more, so she wasn't very worried there. They'd been living cramped in a garret. They'd practically fawned at her feet for the chance to live on the grounds.

  
  


Malurai watched carefully until Sahrid was out of sight. Then she set a bell out on the counter, tucked the fat purse underneath it, and went back into the back room to pull a chair up by the narrow iron bedstead. The Dunmer lay on his side on the turned-back sheets, dressed in the same things she'd seen him in last, though they smelled of soap and had probably been washed at least once since then. His hair was a greasy tangled mess, like he'd just tried to knot it around itself. He had curled himself into a slightly less uncomfortable position, but his face was very pale and he was breathing very shallowly and slowly. He did not respond to his name, or to shaking his shoulder. Even unfastening his stiff upstanding collar and scrubbing his sternum with her knuckles produced only a momentary stirring and muttering. Leaning forward, she could understand none of it. Malurai sighed and got up to go to the stairs that went up the back of one side of the back room.

  
  


“J'sulo,” she said. “I've got a new patient that needs a full exam, and it's possible I'll miss the bell. Can you watch the front for a little?”

  
  


There was a shuffle and a loud miao from upstairs that she recognized as his “I'm coming” noise, a sort of brief low-pitched trill, and then her brother came trotting down the stairs. J'sulo was larger than a Cyrodilic housecat, not as big as something like a nix hound but probably thirty-five pounds. He was a slender, muscular creature with a long, tapering tail and ears almost as tall as the length of his arched muzzle. His coat was tan, speckled and striped with darker brown in a pattern not unlike Sahrid's. The skin around his eyes and the leather of his nose and pads were kohl black. He customarily wore two small golden earrings in his right ear and an amulet on a chain around his neck, not merely for fashion's sake but to advertise to the less observant of their customers that they were speaking to a citizen of the Empire and not a pet. A mage of sufficient experience would be aware of a slightly staticky feeling in proximity to him, the slightest hint of the edges of a very powerful aura of magicka. Now he came over to sniff at the Dunmer, huffed, and shot her a sympathetic look out of his enormous yellow-green eyes.

  
  


“I've no idea what's wrong, but if I had to guess I'd say she's worked him just about to death on the old place,” Malurai said. “In which case we're in for probably a lengthy convalescence.”

  
  


“Warghle,” J'sulo said, or some comment like it, and twitched his tail once as he headed for the front room: _well, it's your problem now._

  
  


Malurai sighed and set about undressing the Dunmer so that she could examine him more fully. He was resistless, limp, seemingly completely unaware of what she was doing. When she tried the usual test, holding his hand over his own face, it bonked directly into his nose without effect. His body was not very scarred for someone working as a bodyguard. There were a couple of marks on his right arm and side that looked like they might have come from broken glass, smeary and stretched, very old. The round scars on his throat looked very much as though they'd come from a vampire, too small and neat for an animal, but they were dry. Besides, Malurai knew the symptoms of porphyric hemophilia – she'd treated the odd victim here – and he did not have them. There was a long cut-mark across his gut from something sharp, the straight line of paler gray scar very neat, and a star-shaped messier one in his shoulder that had come from a bolt or arrow. He had no aura to suggest any training in magery.

  
  


Withal he was wiry and thin, muscle stretched taut over his bones. For that matter he was probably a couple of inches taller than Malurai, maybe more than that taller than Sahrid. He didn't have the burly frame she expected from people who professionally stood between other people and blows. Well, he was still alive, and so was Sahrid, so he must at some point have been good at it. It was hard to tell his age. The races of elves aged more slowly than humans or betmer, and his face was so sunken and hollow that he might have been anywhere from thirtyish in human years to fifty. She looked thoughtfully at his face, then pressed hard on the back of one of his hands. The white mark in the gray of his skin stayed longer than it should.

  
  


_So, dehydration, for one._

  
  


She found nothing on his body to indicate any other cause of his unconsciousness. A quick check under the loin wrap found everything there normal, nothing to suggest an internal bleed. She healed him again just in case, but she was not surprised when it had no effect. She got a glass of water and a jug and set them on the table beside him, then tucked him under the covers, propped him up on some pillows to ease his breathing, and put his clothes away.

  
When she came back she knuckled his sternum again, hard, until it was white under her fingers. He shook his head, squinting his eyes open very slightly.

  
  


“Drink,” she said loudly and clearly, and held the water to his lips. He swallowed as it poured into his throat, not completely conscious, but still possessing that reflex. It took some minutes to get a couple of glasses of water down him, because he kept lapsing back into unconsciousness when she stopped doing anything directly and significantly uncomfortable.

  
  


He didn't seem that far gone, but she put one of the fat little quilted pads under him just in case.

  
  


Malurai took turns with J'sulo working the front that day so that she could check on her patient periodically, and slept on the other patient bed so that she would know if anything happened during the night. He was still sleeping when she woke up, and for many hours after that, but his breathing seemed to grow more robust as the day went on. She got him to drink more water and even a little broth that night, but he was never conscious enough to say anything coherent or to seem to realize where he was. Sahrid never came back to check on him, though late the second day an Argonian teenager very politely came to ask after him.

  
  


The second morning, when he had been out for effectively three nights and two days, Malurai came down from performing her morning ablutions and found him restless, shaking his head.

  
  


“Noro?” she said, sitting down on the chair beside the bed. “Noro, do you hear me?”

  
  


He squinted his eyes open, blinking at her and at the room. The back room was long and low, with its two beds and its counter for her instruments and shelf for the potion bottles. Everything was very plain, though there was a nice painting of the bay hung where the patient beds faced it, in case that helped. There were no windows. They would've had to face onto the walls of other buildings.

  
  


He cleared his throat, then said in the sort of rough gravel voice she was accustomed to hearing from Dunmer men:

  
  


“Where's this?”

  
  


“You're in the back room of the shop,” Malurai said. “We met a week or so ago. I'm Malurai.”

  
  


“How'd I get here?” He sat up, leaning on his elbows, then grimaced.

  
  


“Sahrid and her servant brought you in a wagon. Apparently she was unable to wake you. That was two days ago now. Where does it hurt?”

  
  


“Everything,” he said. “Everything hurts, but I think it's just sore. Is there a privy?”

  
  


“Through the door in the back,” she said. “I'll help you.”

  
  


“I don't need your help,” he snapped, and tried to stand up and promptly almost fell on his face. Malurai caught him around the waist. He was fine until one of her hands touched his upper back, and then he went completely rigid. She held still, ready to let go if he was about to start swinging, but he didn't move.

  
  


“Easy,” she said. “I'm not going to hurt you, I just don't want you breaking your nose on the floor.”

  
  


“Right,” he said. She could feel him shaking under her hands. “Right. Where are my pants?”

  
  


“Let's get to the privy first and then worry about that,” she said. Noro Laend leaned heavily on her shoulder as she walked him over there, then transferred his weight to the sink. He stood testing his legs for a second, then waved her off.

  
“Get my clothes, will you?”

  
  


She shrugged and shut the door and went to get the clothes he'd come in. It didn't have a lock in case of emergencies. When he opened the door to the privy she handed them in. J'sulo poked his head curiously in around the front doorpost, but then the bell rang and he had to go back to the counter.

  
  


Malurai went to the upstairs parlor to get some tea that had gone cold and broth and toast and a large glass of water. When she came back down the bathroom door was just creaking open a notch.

  
  


“There's food,” she said. “The tea is cold but it's not bad tea. You should drink water as well. You were very dehydrated when you were brought in.”

  
  


“I'm sorry for being an asshole,” he said, and staggered over to sit back down on the bed, running his hands over the hopeless mess of his hair.

  
  


“Most people are, in your situation. I could cut it,” Malurai said, setting the tray on the small table by the bed. “Your hair. If you're all right having someone behind you with scissors.”

  
  


“I'm not afraid of that,” he said. He sniffed the broth, then sipped it carefully, grimacing again as it hit his stomach, but it stayed down.

  
  


“What did she do to you?” Malurai asked.

  
  


The look he gave her was unutturably weary. “Nothing that'd leave a mark.”

  
  


“Something has,” she said. “Looked like an arrow, a shortsword, and a vampire.”

  
  


“Oh, sure. That's my job, that part,” he said bitterly.

  
  


“Were you a sellsword by profession?” Malurai asked.

  
  


“Ha. No, I was trying to drink myself to death on skooma in the Underworks when she staggered in running from the Ordinators,” he said, reaching for the toast. “Maybe two months ago, now? It seems like more. It's probably less. She stole that frenzy spell she likes so much from the Temple. It's fucking terrifying, too. I've seen ten people slaughter each other with weapons, hands and teeth while she stood back invisible not doing a damn thing.”

  
  


“Then what does she need you for?” Malurai asked curiously. The fact that Sahrid now was in possession of such a spell left her with an uncomfortable balled-up feeling in her gut. She realized now that she had forgotten to cast her spell of protection the last time they'd spoken. _I can't allow that to happen ever again._

  
  


“There were also two dremora. Spells don't always work on them,” he said.

  
  


“You killed two dremora.” She wasn't trying to sound skeptical, it just came out that way.

  
  


“I wouldn't believe me either,” he grunted, waving a bony gray hand. “Good toast. Thanks.”

  
  


“Don't mention it. I'll get the scissors and we'll do that when you're finished,” Malurai said. “So what did happen?'

  
  


“Oh, to me, you mean?” he was drinking the broth again.

  
  


“Yes, to you, who else?” she looked at him incredulously, but the red-on-red eyes were distant, not looking at her or possibly even the room. She got up to go and get one of the pairs of little scissors and a towel.

  
  


“Haven't slept the night through in a while,” he said. “Not since that inn. Some poor bastard tried to steal the daedric mace off us and she frenzied me. I tore his throat out with my teeth. She had to hide up the rafters 'til it wore off. We've been working on that huge damn square Imperial house pretty hard the last few days, and then yesterday she charmed me twice 'cause I was too dozy to pay attention, and... I saw the vampire again and everything just turned off. That's all I remember.”

  
  


Malurai pulled her lips to once side, trying to decide how much of this was true and how much might be the invention of a mind deranged by fatigue, dehydration, and possibly drink or skooma. She believed he'd worked himself flat, and she had no doubt that Sahrid would manipulate him with spells; she wasn't entirely sure about the thief and the vampire. She came and stood behind the chair with the things in her hands, watching him curiously.

  
  


_He didn't smell chemical when he came in. This nose wouldn't miss that. And if I had, J'sulo would've said something. His nose is even better than mine._

  
  


“Did she leave money?” he asked, interrupting Malurai's thoughts.  
  
“Yes, she left your purse. It's under the front counter when you're ready for it,” she said. “Normally I charge fifty a night for overnight observation of a patient when it's not terribly strenuous.”

  
  


“She's never taken my money,” he said. “Odd, now I come to think of it. Made me deposit what I got from selling the mace in the bank, even. I guess she hopes it'll make me stay. Not that I'd leave. Where would I go?”

  
  


“Anywhere,” Malurai said. “Anywhere Sahrid isn't, if I was you.”

  
  


He snorted. “You know how to heal. You know how to use that shortsword too, she said.” He glanced at the small blade at Malurai's hip. “I don't know how to do a damn thing. Before she found me I did every lousy job that exists in Vivec. Verei had some ambitions, she might be a potter now or something. I had none.”

  
  


He had finished the food and was most of the way through the water.

  
  


“All right, come sit in the chair,” Malurai said. “Who is Verei?” She laid the towel around his shoulders to catch any falling strands, careful not to touch his back with her fingers.

  
  


“She was my wife,” he said. “The Temple dissolved the marriage at her request on the grounds of me being a useless bastard and, more importantly, because I stole her bride price and used it to buy skooma. Four hundred drakes.” He paused, laughing very quietly as Malurai tried to untangle his hair enough to see what should be cut and what left. “It's almost nothing. I've got many times that in that purse. I wish I could send her something. Whoever she's with now, they could probably both use it...”

  
  


Malurai finally gave up and just cut the main knot away, tucking it into a fold of the towel.

  
  


“You could send it by courier,” she said. “If they go by boat they're probably safe from bandits. No pirates this close to the shore.”

  
  


“You're right,” he said. His voice was quieter. He was becoming slightly less stiff under her fingers, gradually coming to believe she was not about to cast something on him.

  
  


“I'm going to make this quite short,” she said. “A lot of it is just hopeless.”

  
  


“I don't care. Shave it, if it's easier,” he said, lifting a hand indifferently and letting it flop back into his lap. “Who cares?”

  
  


“You're tired,” Malurai said. “You've had a bad time for a while now.” That was safe to assume even if he was making up some of the parts about dremora and sneak thieves. It was obvious Sahrid had successfully wriggled inside his head. “You'll feel better when you've had time to recover.”

  
  


Noro Laend mumbled something indistinguishable. His head was starting to droop forward under her hands. She held it up with a hand on his forehead until she had finished her rough trim. His hair was very short and somewhat ragged, but it still looked better than the mess it had been before.

  
  


“All right, lie down again,” she said. “You're done for a while, I think.”

  
  


He flopped back into bed with his clothes on. She pulled the covers back over him. He was already asleep again before she had finished, breathing softly and regularly.

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

Malurai took away the towel to shake out, then took care of the laundry and the dishes and went to relieve J'sulo at the front counter. He trilled at her inquiringly.

  
  


“He'll do,” she said. “Physically, anyway. If it was up to me I wouldn't leave him alone near anything sharp for a while. I'm not sure how much of what he says is true and how much he's made up to explain things he doesn't understand or doesn't remember. She's been meddling with his head.”

  
  


J'sulo sat up on the seat behind the counter, clicking his tongue. The little chalkboard on the counter propped itself upright and the chalk on a string floated up to begin writing. Malurai was aware of the discharge of magicka, of the flavor of Alteration that she could never describe in words as other than “slightly purple.”

  
  


_Of course she has,_ he wrote.  _And she would you and me, if she were able. But she had to acquire the money from somewhere, and you and I both know she considers simple theft too great a risk. She cares a great deal how she looks to everyone._

  
  


“She seems to have stolen the frenzy spell she's been using on him,” Malurai said. “That's unusual for her.”

  
  


_Is it safe for you to be alone with this mer?_ The chalk wrote.

  
  


“Yes,” Malurai said. “He doesn't like being touched on the back or shoulders, but he's unarmed and he's about as strong as a kitten right now. And he hasn't acted hostile. He seems more resigned. Like I said, I'm not leaving the scissors in his reach. I don't think he's fast enough to get my sword before I stop him. She recruited him out of a sewer and it seems like she's just been trying to beat him into the shape of a bodyguard with spells and money.”

  
  


_There's little hope for him, then,_ J'sulo wrote.  _If she's had to do actual work she'll be back for him._

  
  


Malurai sighed. “I can't stop him from going, and he doesn't think he can survive without her.”

  
  


_Poor fellow,_ wrote the chalk. He was coming to the end of the board, and here he paused, peering at the rag on the corner. It whisked off and briskly brushed the words away.

  
  


“Yes,” Malurai said. “Well, we do what we can.”

  
  


J'sulo voiced a low trill of agreement.

  
  


Noro woke lying on his side on something soft, with something else soft over his shoulder. He lay confused for a while trying to figure out what had happened. Sahrid wasn't curled up against his back breathing down his neck, so she hadn't dragged him up to the bed because she was cold. His head felt lighter than he remembered. A clumsily questing hand found his hair short.

  
  


He remembered... Something. A conversation with an ohmes, a calm and sturdy person who never smiled and hadn't done anything to him at all, whose hands on his head had been gentle and soothing, lulling him to sleep. That seemed unreal. On the other hand, he well knew his own lack of imagination; if he'd been able to invent images that vivid on his own he'd probably have never turned to skooma. Noro blinked his eyes open on a long, narrow room with another bed in it that was empty and sunlight pouring in under a curtain on the same wall his bed was on.

  
  


_I'm thirsty and I need a piss. Let's start there._ He turned to look at the night stand and found a glass and a pitcher. His hands were reasonably steady as he poured and drank, and then he got up to stumble to the privy. Yesterday he'd needed help. Had it been yesterday? How long  _had_ he been here?

  
  


He emerged from the privy a few minutes later, hair dampened and fingered down into some semblance of order. The ohmes was over by the bed, setting a tray on the little table. She'd poured out a glass and taken the pitcher over to the counter. She flicked an ear as she looked at him. Her tail was, he saw now, naked, brown and speckled but hairless except for the tuft of tawny hair at the tip.

  
  


“I'm glad to see you up,” she said. “Come and eat. We'll try something more substantial today.”

  
  


“How long has it been?” he asked as he sat down. She sat in the chair facing him, watching him with eyes the same color as Sahrid's.

  
  


“All afternoon and all night. It's morning now. How do you feel?”

  
  


Noro was looking at the tray, realizing that his mouth was watering at the delicious scent of roast nix and slices of cooked kwama egg.

  
  


“Doesn't hurt today, any of it,” he said. He pulled a fork over and used it to roughly cut pieces to eat. “Thank you. Have you eaten?”

  
  


“Yes, earlier,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  
  


“Your name is Malurai,” he said.

  
  


“That's right. My brother is J'sulo. He's watching the front counter.” There was a greeting trill from behind the curtain.

  
  


“Your sister is Sahrid,” Noro said slowly.

  
  


“That's true as well,” Malurai said.

  
  


“You're not very like her,” he said.

  
  


“Thank you,” Malurai said dryly. Noro huffed a dry little laugh as he chewed. It was the best thing he thought he'd ever tasted.

  
  


“'S good, this. She'll be back,” he sighed.

  
  


“Probably,” Malurai said.

  
  


Noro ate in silence for a couple of moments. Malurai was still, watching him. She didn't seem bored or restless, just still, a restful small presence there in her chair with her tail lying in an arc around her ankles. _Not much like Sahrid at all._

  
  


Eventually he took a drink and set down the glass. “Do you think you could teach me something?” he asked. “With the sword?”

  
  


Malurai flicked an ear, looking at him. After a moment the very tip of her tail twitched.

  
  


“Do you think you would be able to learn from me?” she asked quietly.

  
  


“What?” Noro gave her a blank look. “Oh. I hate Sahrid because she uses me like a guar, not because she's a Khajiit.”

  
  


Malurai was silent in a way that struck him as skeptical.

  
  


“Look, I know you've probably known a lot of Dunmer at this point, but I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Seven Graces and how everyone has their place and all that Temple garbage,” Noro said. “And I would not be heard saying that in Vivec, but it's true. I am lower than shit. I do not have a problem being taught anything by anyone. I mean, I don't have my sword here, but you probably start a beginner holding a stick or something, right? So they don't cut themselves?”

  
  


“Yes,” Malurai said. “You can hold a ruler while I teach you the first form. Twenty gold the first lesson. Ten each after that if you still want to. But you have to wait until the shop closes at six, and if there's an emergency I'm still going.”

  
  


“Sure,” Noro said.

  
  


“Why do you want me to teach you if you've already killed two dremora?” she asked.

  
  


Noro ran a hand over his newly short hair, trying to decide how to explain.

  
  


“Sahrid can make me the strongest, fastest mer in the world for about five minutes,” Noro said. “I was so fast they could hardly see me and so strong my ebony blade could cut daedric armor, and I was wearing a robe that protects against fire – she took it from the vampire. And even then, one of them knocked me flying and I hit my head. All I know at this point is that the sharp bit goes into the other mer. Without spells on, anyone who knows a damn thing would murder me. Easily.”

  
  


Malurai shrugged. “It's your gold. We'll give it a try.”

  
  


Noro grunted, satisfied, and got up to go stick his head out through the curtain. J'sulo looked up from the chair behind the counter and trilled inquiringly.

  
  


“I've just come to get my purse,” he said. “That's it right there.” He pointed. The Khajiit made a small, odd chirp and the purse rose to float toward Noro. He took it carefully and retreated back through the curtain. “Thanks.” He vaguely remembered Sahrid saying something about her brother using telekinesis to write. It seemed a long time ago now even though it was probably less than five weeks.

  
  


He counted out the payment for his treatment up through the next day and his first lesson and gave it to Malurai. He spent a lot of the day resting, not always asleep, just lying down looking at the ceiling and thinking about what had happened. Sometimes he thought about nothing at all. It was a tremendous relief to have moments of silence without painful exertion. At one point she brought a worried-looking woman back to the other bed and drew a white curtain all the way around it on a track in the ceiling he had not noticed was ever there – they must have built a new, lower ceiling to include it. A glance revealed his own bed actually had a curtain that could be closed around it as well. He looked at it for a while. Then he fell asleep.

  
  


When he woke up the woman was gone and the room was darker. He could hear bustling about in front of the curtain that divided the back from the main shop. When he went to peer out he found J'sulo counting the cash box, little stacks of drakes clinking up in towers beside him, and Malurai outside closing the big wooden shutters that covered the windows. On her way back she handed him a ruler, a worn piece of wood with barely visible numbers in the Imperial system painted on it.

  
  


“Help me push the beds against the back wall,” she said.

  
  


The next couple of hours were very instructive. Not because he learned that someone like Malurai would absolutely murder him in anything resembling an equal contest – he had already been very certain of that – but because he began to see an opening vista of knowledge that he had not previously imagined. He'd always known on some level that the men and mer that fought in Vivec's Arena probably learned from someone, but he'd never thought about what that probably involved. In two hours he had just about attained the ability to do the first form without falling down, but he could not yet see how that was going to help him get from the point of a live enemy standing up in front of him to a dead enemy at his feet.

  
  


Malurai moved slowly and carefully through most of it, so that he could see and copy what she was doing, but he was able to tell that she was capable of being much more fluid than she had been. It showed in the moments when she moved to reposition his limbs, when she changed position to explain something.

  
  


She was careful when she touched him. She never touched his back or neck, and she always said when she was going to move his arm or leg. He said very little except to ask for clarification. It was strangely easy to be taught, in fact. He had always resented Verei telling him what to do, and he passionately loathed Sahrid's cajoling. Malurai was quiet, matter-of-fact. Two months ago he might have been sullen and uncooperative; but the mer he had been three months ago was gone. He was certain that what he was now was still a broken and incomplete thing, not useful for any normal purpose, but for better or for worse, he was changed forever.

  
  


“Thank you,” he said at the end, as he handed her back the ruler. She shot him a surprised look, the tip of her tail twitching once.

  
  


“You're welcome. You've done well,” she said. “Do you want to try another lesson tomorrow?”

  
  


“Yes,” he said. “During the day I'll go find a courier.”

  
  


“I'd get yourself a leather shirt, too,” Malurai said. “If you're determined on going out again.”

  
  


In Ebonheart's main square by the ebony statue he found a sturdy Imperial with a shield and a longsword and a mail shirt and a completely humorless face. Noro paid the man 300 drakes for his services and sent him off with a smaller purse he'd bought to hold the 800 drakes he sent. The note inside the little bag said:

  
  


_Verei:_

  
  


_Here is what I stole from you, with interest. I'm sorry. I believe you will accomplish whatever you set your hand to do. Whoever you do it with, I wish them well also._

  
  


_Noro_

  
  


Noro's purse was much lighter than it had been when he was dropped off at the shop, but he could not say that he was sorry for it. There was still a nagging voice in the back of his mind wondering if there was anywhere in Ebonheart he could buy skooma, and the less gold he was carrying around on him the better. A leather shirt in the Cyrodilic style cost him another hundred, but they shaped it to his body and tightened the buckles until it fit.

  
  


Two more days passed, two more lessons. He practiced during the day what he learned in the evenings. He felt a bit stupid lunging around the patient area with a ruler, but nobody could see him most of the time, and Malurai did not comment except to occasionally grunt approvingly or, in one case, reposition his feet again. He'd no idea how to cook still, but he went up to the living area to help with the dishes in the small upper kitchen. Even though he and Malurai and J'sola hardly spoke, he still felt it was the happiest he'd ever been.

  
  


On the third day after he sent the courier, he was upstairs doing dishes from lunch when he heard a familiar voice from below. He dried the plate in his hand, straightened his leather shirt, and went downstairs with slow, resigned steps.

  
  


Malurai must still be at the market. Sahrid was in the front of the shop talking to J'sulo, gesturing animatedly. The alfiq sat on the counter with one ear up and one flat, tail twitching behind him.

  
  


“Everything is clean and nice, and the rain tank and the boiler are working, and Talks-Just-So hunts up fresh game all of the time. It only needs furnishings to be ready for company. You and Malurai must come out and see me when it's finished. It will be a home again. I've already written to father.”

  
  


Noro fastened his purse to his belt, checked his bootlaces, and went to push the curtain aside. J'sulo was writing, the chalk hovering above the board as it stood propped against his legs. Noro slid through the counter gate and around beside Sahrid so that he could read it.

  
  


_How will you furnish it?_

  
  


“Don't you worry, I have a plan,” Sahrid said cheerfully. “Oh, hello, Noro. I'm glad you're better. Are you ready to go? Sahrid has a new pack for you, and she brought your sword. Here, it's heavy.”

  
  


Noro held out his hand for the ebony sword's scabbard and belt and buckled it on over his woolen tunic. Then he went to squat next to the square canvas knapsack that sat by the door. It was not a small knapsack. There was a bedroll rolled tightly and attached to the top of it. It got a little less fat when he had unrolled a cloak from inside it and put it on, but it still held what looked to him like many days' worth of dried food, two waterskins, and another set of what looked like woolen off-the-shelf clothes. The linens were nice. He tied the rectangular flap shut with the leather thongs attached to it, shrugged it on over his cloak, and stood up. As he did all of this he heard the scratch of the chalk, and then Sahrid saying,

  
  


“Of course he wants to go. Noro Laend knows how far he would get without me.”

  
  


J'sulo meowled to get his attention, wiping off the board, then held it up for his inspection as he telekinetically wrote:

  
  


_You don't have to go._

  
  


“It's going to be somebody,” Noro said quietly. “The next one might not deserve it. Tell Malurai I thank her for everything.”

  
  


“True, not many people deserve the fortune you are about to achieve, my friend. Let us start off at once. We've a long walk ahead of us.”

  
  


He lifted a hand to J'sulo, who watched him go with flat ears, and walked out of the shop and into the street after Sahrid. She had a knapsack on too. It looked notably smaller and lighter than his, but it had a couple of tall, narrow pockets on the outside that his did not, oilskin lining peeping around a flap.

  
  


“Where are we going?” he asked, trying to keep the dread roiling in his gut out of his voice.

  
  


Sahrid's accent became thicker the further they got from the shop. She was leading him to the right away from the shop, away from the plaza, toward the further reaches of the city. They would pass through the district where she had gotten the deed to her house, and from there she must be planning to take a boat from one of the smaller fishing piers to the mainland.

  
  


“To the North and the West, past Seyda Neen, and out to an island where nobody ever goes. There is an old stronghold there called Telesnaryan,” she said.

  
  


Noro shot her a look. “We're not just going to murder some poor religious sods and take their gold, are we? Most of the old places are full of a bunch of houseless rich sitting around talking about how great their ancestors were and praising Ayem. Verei used to have a distant cousin who went on retreats to one of those places as a maidservant.”

  
  


“Not to this place, she guarantees it,” Sahrid said smugly. “You see, Sahrid went to see her friend Nisamai, who buys Noro's daedric mace and who has her own shop where she buys and sells many things to many interesting people. Nisamai has a brother called Ra'nasha, who went out one day to see what he could see on the island, because he had never been there and he is very soft-footed and sometimes rich Dunmer have nice things that they will not miss.”

  
  


“Right. With you so far,” Noro said. It did not surprise him that Sahrid was acquainted with a broker who handled potentially stolen daedric artifacts, although he was mildly surprised someone with that much money would spend their time in such a seedy hole as the one they'd visited. _Maybe there's a Thieves Guild cornerclub in the basement or something._

  
  


“Ra'nasha comes back sick as a guar and telling a crazy story. Nisamai did not believe him, but Sahrid does. He says that he sneaked up one side of the fortress and peeked over the rim, and there he saw a couple of naked mer kneeling in an ash-pit eating bloody raw meat with their hands and teeth. Now, Sahrid is not an expert on the worship of the Tribunal, but she is reasonably certain this is not a typical ritual.”

  
  


“Of course not,” Noro said, frowning.

  
  


“He wonders very much what is going on, and while he is fearful, he has already had a long trip and he does not want to come back emptyhanded because then he will not be able to buy moon sugar, no. So he creeps past them ever so softly and into the big house on top of the fortress -”

  
  


“Come on,” Noro said, irritation momentarily overcoming fear. “I KNOW you know the word keep.”

  
  


“Do not be surly, Noro, she is getting to the good part. He creeps down dark corridors full of red candles and strange incense and he finds some doors that are locked and some that are not, and behind one that is locked he sees things made of glass, green and bright, worth nearly as much as daedric things but ever so much lighter. So he takes a dagger and is on his way back out when a horrible thing lunges out at him from a room, like a mer in a robe but with a terrible face full of arms and arms and arms like a dreugh instead of a nose or mouth. And it throws a poison spell at him, but Khajiit is agile and it only catches him with the very outermost edge. He runs around the corner and out so fast that the hounds of Oblivion could not catch him. Ra'nasha is sick for many days, almost dies out in the wilderness, but Khajiit is not a weak creature and he finally makes it back home to show Nisamai his dagger and tell his tale.”

  
  


“That sounds made up,” Noro said skeptically.

  
  


“But no. Ra'nasha is not afraid to admit to stealing, not to his sister who buys his dagger and would never tell the guards. And when Khajiit embroiders a tale, he embroiders it with many strong guards and thick locks, not with monsters from beyond the vale of what is known. He definitely does not invent naked cannibals, no, because no Khajiit wants to see a naked mer.”

  
  


Noro had read one volume of _The Real Berenziah_ once when he was bored, before he sold it for skooma, and he was fairly sure some Khajiit did in fact want to see a naked mer, because that particular anecdote had been somewhat more articulately descriptive than he was used to see in print. Still, it wasn't a point worth arguing. As long as it meant Sahrid didn't want to see _him_ naked, he had no quarrel with it.

  
  


“So it's some kind of daedra or something?” he said uncertainly. He didn't know much of anything about daedra. He'd heard of the dremora and the saints and seducers even before he'd met Sahrid, and he had known someone who knew someone who said they'd seen a clannfear out on an island once, but that was it.

  
  


“Sahrid thinks perhaps not,” she said. “Certainly it is no sort she learned of in her mage schooling, no. But either way, worship of something dreadful is going on at that place, not a lot of Dunmer venerating the Tribunal. No one will care what happens to them or where their glass things go. And this should make Noro happy: Sahrid spent the last of her free cash on two scrolls. One of them she used there by Nisamai's shop, the scroll of Mark. So we will not have to walk back. Day or night, Nisamai will admit her if her arms are full of glass weapons.”

  
  


Noro grunted acknowledgement. That part, at least, wasn't hard to believe. And it relieved him that he probably wouldn't have to kill any more bandits. It would be bad enough what was in front of them. Maybe worse, he thought glumly. But there was no point in dwelling on it until it happened.

 

The walk wasn't as bad as he expected. Even with the heavy pack it was less of a misery than he remembered their first trek out to the daedric ruin being. He had never enjoyed Sahrid's company, but she was notably more personable when there was no one else around, even if she persisted in maintaining what he now knew to be a feigned Ta'agra accent. She painted optimistic pictures of his future and talked up his prowess in battle. He did not believe her, but it was still easier to deal with than the Sahrid of Trammelwood.

 

The air was cold and dank, the more so as they traveled, but woolen clothing and exertion made it easier to bear.

 

As they traveled gradually North and West the terrain sloped upward but then leveled out. The comberry and willow flowers gradually thinned as the trees grew more knobbly and dull-colored. Vines hung from the branches, and more and more they saw trees with tall knee-like roots growing in green-scummed pools. Lily pads covered some of the swamp so thoroughly that only their presence even suggested water. Here and there mushrooms glowed in the shadows, the same purple and blue mushrooms of his little cave under St. Olm's.

 

"What are those called, anyhow?" he askd after a while, when Sahrid had paused in her explanation of how she was going to arrange a marriage for herself as soon as she had the house furnished. He privately pitied whatever poor bastard came over from Elsewyr and found himself in Sahrid's clutches, but it was always possible he would be as bad she was, some self-absorbed rich asshole. You had to hope.

 

"The blue ones are luminous russula, and the purple ones are violet coprinus," Sahrid said. "Useful to an alchemist, and they flourish in winter where it does not snow. Some will be big as his head before spring, yes." She pointed to a tall knobbly plant that grew in clusters of stems near the edge of the water. The tips glowed pale aqua. "And the draggle-tails, they will furnish the coda flower offerings around the feet of the statues of Vivec, yes. This time of year they are just ampoule pods. They will flower in spring."

 

He had seen those offerings, but never thought to ask what the plant was called. Noro was dimly starting to realize how much of a world existed around him that he knew nothing about. He wondered for a little what had caused the change.

 

_Malurai has. I've never liked to learn because it was always just a way to prepare me for doing things I hated, for knowing my place. But I asked her to teach me. No one made me. I have the power of deciding that now, when I am away from Sahrid._

 

He thought about that carefully as they went. _I still need her. I know so damn little that I'd never get work without her, and certainly not the kind of work to make me rich._

 

_Maybe dead, but rich._

 

_I just have to stay alive through this. This one last thing. Then I'll have money and time, and she will have what she wants and maybe she'll leave me be._

 

"She will have a uniform made for him," Sahrid was saying. "Something very fine, real armor with the family crest on it. He will be the finest armsman that was ever seen, yes."

 

"I'm not your armsman, Sahrid," Noro said.

 

"Silly Dunmer. Then what are you? She will not need a bodyguard when her adventuring days are past, and someone has to keep an eye on him," Sahrid said, waving a hand. "And if he has a fine steady position at Trammelwood he can get a new wife easily, too."

 

"I don't want a new wife," Noro said sullenly. "I didn't want the first one. She wanted me."

 

"But nonsense, every man wants a wife when he has passed the age of wanting a different woman every week, yes," Sahrid said. One pointed ear flicked dismissively. "If he does pass that age, ever. And she knows Noro is not as young as that, or he would have spent his money on whores, not skooma."

 

"I'm fifty-two, and go fuck yourself," he growled. Sahrid laughed.

 

"Well, he need not decide right away, of course. Fifty-two is not even middle-aged yet, for a Dunmer. But think it over. The estate will be a very good place to raise little Dunmer."

 

 _Raise more servants for you, you mean,_ he thought. _Who have always known a life of service and always known you as their mistress. Ayem deliver me from wishing that fate on any children of mine, even if I wanted any._

 

He'd never been a very domestic man, and that was probably partly why he'd never been a good husband. The image of himself in Sahrid's uniform surrounded by fat babies sounded like a trap and a hell.

 

_So what DO I want?_

 

His mind traveled back to the bench in the green yard outside the rich man's office where Sahrid had bought the deed to her home.

 

_A small, quiet place. Without someone there always pushing at me. Without the misery of hard labor for people I don't care about. That can't be so impossible, can it? I can work my own garden, it'll be easier than carrying shit up three stories to the planters in the plaza. Certainly easier than Sahrid's concept of a normal day's work for me. There's got to be some forgotten spit of land out in the Ascadian Isles that hasn't been overrun by bandits and daedra where one man can live a quiet life._

 

It still seemed like an impossible dream, and he thought he knew exactly what Sahrid would say to it.

 

_Bah, live in poverty on some island, have your house knocked over in any storm? Noro can do better than this. Come be my armsman and let me enslave your horde of fat babies._

 

He huffed through his nose, quietly to himself, and walked on.

 


	10. Chapter 10

Sahrid had not disclosed exactly how far they were going to walk, and Noro did not ask because he didn't want to start her talking again. He was sore for a couple of days, but it was nothing to what he'd felt after the days of misery working on the estate. It wore off around the fifth day. By the eighth day of hiking through the Bitter Coast, occasionally having to slog through low murky water to find the trail again, sleeping on the rare dry spots with his cloak over his head to try and keep the bugs away, he was starting to wonder if they were somehow traveling in circles. He squinted at the sun occasionally, but it seemed to stay mostly overhead, somewhere behind them in the morning and in front of them and slightly to their left in the evening, where it logically ought to be if they were going Northwest. At least, that was what he concluding after some thought. This was now the longest he had ever spent outside.

 

“How many more days do you think it'll be?” he asked finally, when they had stopped at the end of the eighth day. The swamp around them looked the same to him as it had on the second day, and the fourth. The features of the landscape changed – a stump here, a bigger pond there, a cliff racer attacking them in a helpful bid to enrich their dinner – but it was still full of cypress (he'd eventually asked about the knobbly trees) and vines and draggle-tails and muck. It was usually too damp to build a fire, which meant he regularly woke up with Sahrid's arm draped around his waist as she breathed down his neck. It was hard to believe he had once been nearly indifferent to this. Now it set his teeth on edge, making it hard to fall asleep knowing she would probably creep up on him during the night.

 

Now they sat leaning against the roots of an oak that had somehow survived the damp and planted its roots on a small prominence overlooking a weedy hollow. The sun had set, and Noro could see only by the dim light of the draggle-tail below them, giving the faintest blue tint to the scene. The sky was overcast, hiding the moons, and a cold damp wind sighed through the trees and vines. Sahrid's eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, seeming to change their shape oddly as she turned to look at him, then up at the sky.

 

“Oh, not more than another eight or nine. Tomorrow they should find the Dwemer ruin of Chmthuz. He may look for the big brass tower as they go, if he wishes. Then they must turn to the coast and walk the beach until they see the island. As the racer flies it is not such a great distance, but actually finding the place from which the island may be seen is the trick.” Anyone who was fooled by her Ta'agra accent should at least have looked askance at how perfect her pronunciation of the Dwemer word was, with its strange consonants.

 

“And how are we going to get to the island?” Noro asked.

 

“Sahrid spent some of her now-departed wealth on a couple of useful potions. Don't worry, she has no plans to make him row anywhere.” Her tone was amused.

 

He was slightly mollified by the fact that she must mean she had procured potions of walking on water rather than of breathing underwater. He could not imagine that Sahrid would voluntarily swim anywhere. It was easy to see how she'd exhausted her funds buying kit, but at least she seemed prepared. He'd had a nightmare vision of them reaching the coast and her turning to him brightly and saying, “Well, it is time for Noro to build a boat.”

 

The next day they traveled for a couple of hours uphill, a proceeding that was challenging enough to mostly take Noro's mind away from what was coming. Then they topped the rise at last, a small bare dirt hillock where others had obviously camped often, leaving burned circles in the ground and keeping the weeds and mushrooms at bay. In front of them the marsh sprawled all the way to the distant sea. The distant beach must just be a thin rim of rocks and sand at the edge of the cypress, if indeed there was any beach at all and not just a muddy cliff. He could see the distant glossy shapes of netches drifting among the treetops, the glossy carapaces of the bulls and the pulsing blue tops of the betties bobbing and swaying as if floating on water instead of on air.

 

About midway between their position and the steel-blue glitter of the water something dull yellow jutted up out of the foliage, canted at a curious angle. It was topped by an angular minaret with a rust-brown spire. Noro looked at it with mixed feelings. He had never been a curious or imaginative mer, at least not that he could remember. He had mostly killed the wish to see things like the old Dwemer ruins when he was a boy, doing his best to follow his Temple lessons and behave in accordance with the order of things. The more time he spent in Sahrid's company, the more he thought that perhaps that hadn't been so bad. Still, it thrilled something long-dormant to see the tower standing in its defeated slump there among the flourishing trees. It must have been built in a time before there was a swamp here, when the shore was farther away – or had there even been an Inner Sea, back then? Had the land stretched uninterrupted all the way to Cyrodiil?

 

“That's Chmthuz?” he asked.

 

“Yes. Not much is left besides the tower and the gatehouse below it,” Sahrid said. “It is quite safe. Thieves and smugglers sometimes camp there, but it is too remote to be occupied often. They should not have to entertain visitors, no. Ready?”

 

Noro nodded. They made their way downhill, following the same meandering dirt paths that Sahrid had been leading him down since they left Ebonheart. He was nearly used to the hum of insects and the distant cries of birds. The squonk of cliffracers was inescapable; he felt he would never be far from it wherever he went.

 

Eventually the trees fell away to reveal an artificial clearing, a space strangely free of weeds and undergrowth. The lowest-lying point was flooded, choked with lilypads, but the rest of the ground was bare, dry dirt. It was even more dry and crumbly the closer it got to the massive brown wall that was the ruined brass base of the tower. A sphere bulged outward from a recess in the lower surface facing them, a long-shut door. A crank handle on a stand nearby probably opened it. A low, square building hulked next to it, its doors rotted away to reveal a dry, dark interior innocent of furnishings but possessing some strange mechanism that tunneled away downward through a pipe. Noro felt the teeth-setting hum as they drew nearer, and the air was warmer near the gatehouse.

 

“Did you ever open the door?” he asked.

 

“Oh, yes. But the old lift is long rotten, and the stairs are not in much better case, no. Besides, there is not a gear or a tube left on the first floor. Probably some Alterationist has levitated up and cleaned out the upper tower long since.”

 

He thought that he might have liked to see it anyway, just to have been inside one of the old places, but he did not want to say so to Sahrid. They bedded down with him lying across the doorway facing out and Sahrid in the warmer interior behind him. He didn't mind. It kept her off him all night, and he slept better than he had the entire trip to that point.

 

The next day they turned with the rising sun at their backs and made for the sea. By evening the air was cold, the wind more biting, and Noro caught the scent of salt and rotten seaweed when it blew toward them. Gulls screamed in the distance, masters of the open sky above the waves where the cliff racers were less comfortable. They slept on the driest spot they could find, a nest of boulders above a brackish tidal pond, and rose early, both chilled and cranky and ready to be warmed by movement.

 

In daylight the beach of the Bitter Coast seemed endless, damp sand interlarded with little rocks and broken shells and the occasional washed-up corpse of a slaughterfish surrounded by warring seabirds. Mud crabs with shells big enough to use as bathtubs hulked along the shoreline, indistinguishable from muddy gray-brown boulders until they stirred to clack their enormous mandibles at nothing. Here and there a stream flowed out among the cypresses and down to the sea, at least giving them an easy way to wash up and refresh their water supply. He saw netch in the distance, but they seemed to prefer to stay among the trees. Once or twice they were close enough for him to make out their strange calls as they floated about like giant sea jellies. The betties made a sort of metallic baa-ing noise, like a crank turning inside a can, and the bulls had a sort of ratcheting moan as they called to one another.

 

Noro slept poorly the rest of that week, his dreams troubled by old horrors and the ever-present suffocating presence at his back. The days seemed to smear together after the first two, one very much like another as they plodded on up the beach. Sahrid spoke less than usual, ears perked and eyes turned alertly out to sea. Heavy foreboding seemed to weigh down the gray cloud-drowned horizon. It was almost a relief when she finally spotted the island. It was late afternoon, the sun sunk low enough to show between clouds and sea but not yet gone. Crimson washed the surface of the water.

 

“Look! Is this not it?” Sahrid's ears and tail lifted hopefully as she pointed out to sea.

 

Noro turned to gaze dully outward, squinting. He saw a lump that might be an island, or a swimming mud crab, or two dreughs humping. It could be anything.

 

“I can't tell,” he said.

 

“Pfah. Dunmer eyes are weak, yes. Sahrid knows. Stand close by so that the scroll does not miss him.”

 

He reluctantly shifted closer as she flipped open the scroll case on the outside of her bag to extract a roll of parchment, which she unrolled with some aplomb and began to read. Noro did not understand the tongue. It was not Dunmeris or Ta'agra or even Cyrodilic, but the guttural syllables raised the hairs along his neck. A wave of something washed over him, tingling from the top of his head down to his toes. It was more obvious than anything Sahrid had done to him, and it left him feeling lighter, almost buoyant. In fact, he almost liked it.

 

“All right, let us go,” she said. She plucked up her skirts above her ankles and stepped out daintily onto the waves, easily keeping her balance. Noro stumbled out after her, arms windmilling as he tried not to let the water slide right out from under him. It gave slightly under his weight, almost a sticky feeling, but it held him up. In another second he was walking quickly over it, staring down boggle-eyed at a slaughterfish longer than his leg. It looked equally surprised to see him, opening and closing its underslung lower jaw with all of its sharp teeth. Long weeds waved beneath.

 

“Well, fuck me,” he muttered. “That's something else again.”

 

Sahrid grinned. “It's always special the first time. But they must hurry if they do not want to swim.”

 

Reluctantly he looked up, increasing his pace. He sneaked little glances down into the deep as they went anyway. This would probably be his only chance. There were other fishes, most of them small and silvery, but one or two with streaks of blue or red. Mole crabs drifted about clinging to the fatter weeds with their two scythelike front claws. It was the first time he had seen that keeled, hoodlike shell alive and moving on its own instead of dead and made into a helmet for the guards on the Great House cantons.

 

He hoped to see a dreugh, but beyond a moving shadow that might just as well have been weeds he had no luck. A couple of slaughterfish followed them for more than a hundred yards, probably conditioned that people on the surface meant food was coming soon. That thought made him walk faster.

 

As they drew nearer he saw that it was indeed an island, and it was much larger than it had seemed from the shore. The sloping, roughly tiered sides and flat top of an ancient stone fortress could readily be discerned from some way out. On the flat above the main walls stood the keep, sloping up to a flat roof at a slightly steeper angle than the outer walls. There were a couple of huts built up there, too, of clay like the clay of Vivec, but he couldn't make out much detail. By the time they were close enough for that, they were also close enough that the walls screened them. He stepped from water to land slightly less shakily, letting the tiny wavelets carry him as far as they would. The ground felt as though it were moving under his feet for a minute or so. He had not even noticed that he was growing accustomed to the movement of the Inner Sea.

 

Noro turned toward the broad shallow stairs carved into the long side of the ovoid fortress's base, trying to make his footfalls as silent as possible as he slowly ascended. He could hear chanting from above. There were at least two voices, and the language was Dunmeris, he thought, but the accent and the words were strange, as though it was a far older form of Dunmeris than he was accustomed to hear. He was sure he understood the word _brother_ and _Tribe,_ but a lot of the rest seemed like gibberish. Something about it, whether the low, droning tone or the dull and constant repetition, made him intensely uneasy. It seemed to do something to his inner ears, making him feel off-balance.

 

As he neared the top he sank to hands and knees and climbed like a crawling scrib, tilting his head so that one eye rose slowly above the edge before anything else. A glance to the side showed that Sahrid was creeping along behind him, but aside from the very faint and occasional rustle of garments she was absolutely silent.

 

The upper floor of the fortress was gray and dusty stone, flayed smooth by wind and rain. There were a couple of shallow flat-rimmed ash pits that had no doubt been intended for offering reverence to the ancestors and to Ayem, but now the rim of each was decorated with a fat crimson candle, guttering in the wind from off the sea. The keep loomed up a good three stories beyond the level of the floor, windowless, tapering to its flat roof. The two domed clay huts stood off to the right, their ancient doors marked with diamond cutouts in an old-fashioned style Noro had seen in a book once, never on a real house or building.

 

All of this he noticed in an instant. What arrested his attention was nearer, in the ash pit closest to them. A pair of Dunmer knelt there, both male, both innocent of all clothing except for a scrap of rags bound about their loins. There was a club lying on the ground next to each, wooden nails beaten roughly into the ends so that they stuck out in all directions. Their bodies were encrusted with dirt, bedaubed with mud made of gray ashes and with something red-brown and streaky, decorating their chests with the rough likeness of a symbol he did not recognize, a diamond connected to a circle with odd little horns projecting from the top of the circle. They were still chanting together, each holding up a chunk of pinkish-brown lumpy... meat? He thought it was meat, raw and dripping slightly, but it seemed to be pulsing faintly as they swayed over it.

 

_It's just a trick of the light. Don't get hysterical._

 

He turned to look at Sahrid, turning one hand palm upward: _well?_

 

She shrugged one shoulder, holding up two fingers: _There's only two._

 

Noro rolled his eyes. He drew his shortsword as he straightened up and stepped over the upper edge.

 

“Who are you praying to?” he asked.

 

Both heads jerked around in unison, matted, filthy hair wobbling around their shoulders. They dropped their burdens of meat into the ash pit and took up their clubs. They never ceased to speak, but the chant became more identifiable words:

 

“ _Brother, sister, strangers all, come too early, bleed and fall. Brother, sister...”_

 

As they came toward him, not even trying to spread out and flank him, the sea wind brought him the stench of unwashed bodies and earth and – blood. Dried blood. Their eyes were wide and mad, half-unseeing.

 

Even as his heart sped up he thought he could almost – almost see how the first form was meant to work. _Strike to your left, spin and strike to your right, kick behind you in case the first one is still upright..._

 

But then one of them pulled ahead of the other as they broke into a run, spittle drooling from their mouths as they went on with their droning verse, and he forgot what he had learned and stepped forward and stabbed the mer in the chest. A child could have avoided that stroke from his shaking hand, but the creature in front of him was no longer entirely mer. He ploughed into Noro without stopping, flailing blinding with the club even as blood spurted around the shortsword. He hit nothing, swiping at the air. Noro pushed him into the other one, bracing his foot on his enemy's gut to free his blade. The dying mer's shoulder hit his companion's chest as he fell, the chant going on for seconds after Noro was sure his heart must have stopped. Even as he lay twitching, eyes sightless, his lips still said:

 

“ _Brother, sister, strangers all. Brother, sister, strangers all. Brother... Sister...”_

 

Noro was keenly aware of it as he put up his left arm to block the survivor's descending blow, jarring him as forearm hit forearm but stopping the club from hitting his head. The madmer tried to bite him, his breath smelling like blood and rot as it puffed past his yellow, jagged teeth. He bit into Noro's leather shirt and got no further, and then Noro kneed him in the balls and stabbed him in his right side. As he crumpled up, gasping, the chanting finally stopped, and in the ringing silence Noro swiped at his throat with the tip of the ebony blade.

 

Blood sprayed in a fine arc. Noro did not dodge back fast enough to completely avoid it. Then it was over, and he stood over the dead bodies of two Dunmer who had been alive thirty seconds before.

 

“The keep, or the huts?” he asked quietly, flicking as much blood away as he could. Fuck if he was going to try and wipe the blade on one of the disgusting loincloths, he thought distantly.

 

“The keep.” Sahrid stepped up beside him, fastidiously avoiding the spreading pool of blood. “We go to the left as we go in. Sahrid tells him from there.”

 

He wondered if she thought he would kill her and go get the glass for himself if she told him where it was. If so, she had a lot more faith in his abilities than he did. That might be something worth thinking over later, when he wasn't so preoccupied with trying not to throw up. His head pounded in time with his heart as he kept trying to push away the image of blood, blood from cut throats, blood from fresh wounds, blood blood blood -

 

_Stop it. Be here, now, or you'll never get to be anywhere ever again._

 

He went to the great wooden doors, each with a diamond cutout near the top, and hauled one open. It was not locked, but it was heavy, turning on ancient hinges that had been cut from the wood as part of the door itself and then finished and oiled. There were neither trees nor mushrooms that large in the isle of Vvardenfell, not in the Fourth Era. At least, he'd never seen or heard of one. Thinking about that helped keep him from vomiting and passing out as he stepped into the darkness inside. Sahrid eased the door shut behind them, and they stood in a dark corridor. A very dimly guttering torch illuminated the space near the door, revealing the heavy stone flags underfoot and the quarried gray blocks that made up the walls. Heavy wood arches supported the broad corridor at intervals until it vanished around a curve. It went both directions from the door, probably running the outer edge of the keep.

 

Noro turned to the left. Up ahead, around the corner, something glowed faintly red. He moved forward as quietly as he could, shortsword still in hand.

 

There were a couple of niches in the walls as he rounded the corner. They held statues of... he couldn't tell, not in the dim. They could've been St. Indoril or St. Veloth or his great aunt holding a broom. More of the fat red candles stood at their feet, tinting the hall red but giving forth very little light. They smelled of some kind of incense he had never scented, spicy and sour. Everything was the color of blood. The hallway ran a long way ahead into darkness, the next curve at the other end of the fortress not brightly lit enough to see. Smoke blackened the ceiling of the niches and the stone above them. The candles had been burning day and night for some time now.

 

“First door to the right,” Sahrid whispered from behind him, stirring the hairs on his neck unpleasantly.

 

He squinted. There were spots of greater darkness that might conceivably be doors. He held out a hand to the wall on his right until his fingers hit something wooden instead of the uninterrupted cold stone. He groped at it until he was sure it was a doorpost, straining his ears for any sound. Sahrid had no comment behind him, a breathing waiting presence. He thought he heard more chanting from below, but that could just as well be his fearful imagination. Further investigation with his questing fingers found it was an open doorway, no door. He peered around the corner and down a dark stair into black nothingness.

 

“There will be a sanctuary,” Sahrid breathed in his ear. “There he pauses for her to cast, for there they will find people, and he is not silent enough to creep past. Down at the bottom and go to the right. He will know when.”

 

He nodded. She would be able to see it. He well knew how much better a Khajiit's night vision was than his. Noro groped forward, feeling with his foot until he found the edge of a stair and then tentatively creeping down step by step. He didn't try to avoid making a noise after the first few steps, because the chanting was gradually getting louder. Whoever was down there wasn't listening for intruders.

 

It was the same old, strange Dunmeris of the two madmer above, but there were definitely more than two voices, and some were very strange, as though the cantor were inside a deep well. It was almost a relief when his fingers found a door. He pushed it open to reveal a room lit with the same blood-red light.

  
It was three stories deep. A shallow platform in front of him had stone ramps leading down each side and one down the center; the center ramp terminated in another platform perhaps ten feet above the floor, two more ramps descending from there. There were more niches in the walls at intervals from the ceiling down, again filled with statues smoothed by time and distorted by dim light. The floor of every niche around the stone feet was glutted with the ever-present crimson candles. The smoke hovered around the ceiling, almost choking him with the spicy-sour stench. It made him feel a little dizzy, strangely exalted in a way that skooma had never done, as if his head were not quite in contact with his body.

 

He could see the back of a figure in a robe below him. If it was a Dunmer he must be incredibly fat, because the red linen robe and hood were wide enough to hold two mer of Noro's size. The raised arms terminated in hands like a Dunmer's hands, but in the near-darkness he thought the flesh looked pitted and shiny in a way that no mer's ever should. A scattering of others swayed below the platform, arms upraised. He could not see them clearly, only the general shape of bodies in loincloths or robes.

 

Something brushed past Noro, but he saw only the faintest shimmer in the air on his left: Sahrid was hidden now. Warmth on his shoulder, and he almost threw up again as he tensed, waiting to see if his sanity was about to leave him. Instead he heard the chanting seem to slow down, shifting downward in pitch until it was even more alien and unpleasant. He stepped forward toward the ramp and down far enough to get his head below the smoke, bracing himself with a hand on the cold stone of the wall. The air still stank of blood and unwashed bodies, but at least he could breathe without feeling like his feet were floating off the floor.

 

He knew what he was looking for, so he was not surprised to see some of the poorly-glimpsed worshipers turn and pick up clubs from the floor beside them, throwing themselves at the others. The chants trailed away into incredibly drawn-out screams as the cantors began to try to fight off their fellows. He ran down the ramp toward the fat mer, who was just now starting to lower his arms, and then he skidded to a halt on the platform, feet almost slipping on the stone, and realized he was looking at a monster.

 

The robe was a real and ordinary thing, with panels hanging down the front embroidered in a neat design of angular spirals, as though it belonged to a priest of the Tribunal. The hands were a Dunmer's hands, even if they looked diseased. But the collar of the robe framed a vast smooth lump of a skull covered in that same pitted, glistening flesh. Four gaping holes suggested where eyes ought to be, and below that there was no nose, no mouth, only a mass of tentacles like those of a dreugh. It was no daedra that Noro had ever seen or heard of, a thing that seemed grown from a mer but no longer a mer at all. He was frozen for what seemed long seconds as he stared at it.

 

Heart in his throat, limbs made of lead, Noro might have turned and run if it had not begun to turn toward him, slow, but not as slow as the others. He saw the tentacles lift and a crackle of energy begin to form around them, blue and brilliant, and rather than suffer whatever spell it was trying to cast he ran forward and stabbed at its terrifying face, at the black socket where an eye ought to be. It was obviously trying to move away, but it was still too slow. The blade buried itself deep. His violent attempt to jerk it loose instead cut a bloody furrow down across the thing's face. Blue-black blood spurted, stinking as if it had been dead for weeks. The tentacles slapped at his arms with unexpected force, bruisingly hard and sharp-edged as if they were tipped with bone, but they could not loosen his terrified grip on the hilt. It seemed like forever, hacking and stabbing at it in his half-crazed panic, before it finally staggered back. The shriveled hands dropped to its sides, and it swayed for a second before it -

 

It didn't just fall. It collapsed in itself, flesh folding into cloth and folding again until what subsided to the floor was a double-handful of bubbling blue-gray flesh enmeshed in the folds of a red linen robe.

 

Faced with this madness, Noro's tenuous control of his protesting stomach finally disintegrated. He threw up on it. When he straightened up, trying to spit the taste out of his mouth, he saw that his arms were bleeding. Long scratches crisscrossed his forearms from the thing's many blows, and the sleeves of his woolen tunic were shredded. His leather overshirt had protected his chest and shoulders, but he felt that if he had not been moving so much faster than it was that he would never have lived long enough to kill it.

 

Below the platform there was still a fight going on, but at this distance he could see the combatants. Some of them were Dunmer with clubs, dirty and clad in scraps, like the two madmer from up above. A couple were women, dirty fabric tied around their chests hiding little. The others looked as if they had been Dunmer at some point, like the thing on the platform. Some were eyeless, black sockets gaping above their ruined near-skeletal noses. Some had no faces at all, just a stubby tentacle protruding from the front of their bald heads where a face should be. He realized with another nauseous lurch in his stomach that they must be on their way to becoming what the thing beside him had been. Flares of magicka lingered in the air with dreamlike slowness, so that he could distinctly see the lightning crackling from their hands to envelop the bodies of those around them.

 

_I can wait and watch this awful thing happen in front of me, or I can make it end sooner._

 

In the end he chose the second one. He ran down the right ramp and sank the blade into the first gray back that presented itself, then the next, then a face, then a chest wrapped in scraps of rag, and blood spurted behind him without being able to catch him up. The ebony blade cut even the stiff and unnatural flesh of the transformed as though it had been jelly.

 

There had been eleven living creatures standing below the platform. The first had not hit the floor before the eleventh lethal blow was struck. Noro backed rapidly up against the wall below the platform, looking away from the fountains of blood. Not all of it was red. The ones who had transformed the furthest had blood that was blue-black and reeking, like the thing on the platform.

 

The world sped up again with a lurch, in time for him to hear the rain of blood and bodies. He did not look up until he heard a scuffed footstep. Noro jerked his sword arm up, teeth bared, but the shimmer in the air in front of him was familiar.

 

“It is only Sahrid,” she said. “He has done well. Ugh, what monstrous things! What daedra can this be, that is worshipped here?”

 

“No daedra,” he whispered. “All of those things were Dunmer, once.”

 

“We must hurry,” she said, and that she had forgotten the Ta'agran accent told him volumes. “They were many. I have only enough for perhaps a small healing left, do you understand? To your right, quickly.”

 

Noro turned and saw a doorway, rectangular, with an ordinary wooden doorpost like the one upstairs. The hallway beyond was lit by faint yellow torchlight, something desperately familiar and welcome in that moment. He walked that way as quickly as he could, and from the corner of his eye he saw Sahrid dissolve into view, a shadow at his back. There was no one in the hallway, but he could hear voices in the distance raised in question. Somewhere there were shuffling feet.

 

Sahrid tugged at his arm, unaware of how close she had come to being stabbed in the eye, and turned toward a short hallway on the left. It jagged sharply around a corner and ended suddenly in another of the wooden doors with the diamond cutouts. Sahrid stood on tiptoe to peer through it, then rummaged in the scroll pocket of her pack and came out with another one. Noro was just sane enough to realize that if she had spent her last drake on her Recall scroll, she must have spent a lot of drakes before it on others. She leaned forward to hiss words in a strange tongue at the door. It clicked softly and swung inward, the hinges creaking gently.

 

The dim torchlight fell on a short spike of metal with a tangle of steel wire and red stones at the top of it, shaped roughly into the symbol that had been painted on the worshippers above. Something had driven it into a chink in the stone floor so hard that it stood rigidly straight. Around it stood benches piled upside-down on other benches. They were cobwebbed and dusty, but the smears and blots in the dust said they had been disturbed not that long ago. A halberd leaned against one of the stacks, the axelike blade glistening brilliant green. The blade terminated in a spike behind, and the end of the long steely shaft terminated in another sharp point of green volcanic glass. Laid along the thin edge of an upside-down bench was a green-bladed sword as long as Noro's leg. Cruel spikes protruded at angles from the base of the blade and tipped the ends of the guard. Tantalizing glimpses of other weapons showed among the mess, a hilt sticking out between legs here, a steel shaft jutting from under one bench only to vanish under the neighboring one.

 

“Keep watch,” Sahrid hissed. “She will call you when she is ready to read the scroll. Take the shield, he may need it.” She grabbed at what he had at first taken for a large serving plate propped against the wall and thrust it at him, and he took it rather than have it dropped on his toes. It was about a fourteen-inch dishlike round of gleaming glass with the center bound in some metal paler than steel. It seemed untarnished by time, the light gleaming dimly from a central boss surrounded by small studs.

 

Noro fumbled at it onehanded as he turned toward the hallway, trying not to drop it from a position pinned under his armpit. He felt dizzy, lightheaded now that his stomach was empty. How the Hells were you supposed to wear one of these things? Strap, right, there was a strap on the concave side. He managed to get his fingers through it without dropping it on the floor, though it made him grimace with pain as metal and leather slid over his lacerated forearm. He could hear clicks and clinks behind him, the slide of wood against something harder. Now he could definitely hear footsteps coming from the area of the sanctuary, voices raised in shouts of consternation.

 

“Better hurry,” he whispered. “I think they've found the bodies.”

 

A sudden discharge of magicka raised the hairs all along his spine. He turned to stare back into the room, where the halberd was gone, the big sword was gone, and a couple of the benches had been shifted. A few drifting pink sparks gently faded into nothing in front of him.

 

Sahrid was gone. He was alone in the depths of Telesnaryan.

 


	11. Chapter 11

For a moment Noro stood stupefied, staring at the empty space where there had been a Khajiit. Then he heard voices behind him. He slithered out of shield and knapsack and shoved them under a bench, then turned to pull the door shut as quietly as he could, flattening himself to the wall beside it in the narrow space between doorpost and tangle of benches. A wooden leg was poking him in the ribs, little uncomfortable jab with every frantic breath. The thinnest diamond of yellow light shone in through the hole in the door, illuminating just the top of the mess of furnishings across from him.

 

She had taken more than two things, he could see that now. There was only the occasional stray gleam of metal winking from the wooden jungle. She must have grabbed everything she could reach before she used her scroll, so that she would reappear outside the shop in Ebonheart with her arms full of prizes.

 

What was she going to say to her brother and sister, he wondered? Would Malurai and J'sulo even wonder what had happened to him?

 

_Of course they will, they're better people than Sahrid. Better than I ever was. But what can they do? She'll probably tell them I was killed._ A small surge of anger cut through the sickness and fear.  _Because she PLANS for me to die down here, the damned conniving s'wit. She doesn't need me any more, and I'm not even good enough to be her armsman and wear her stupid fucking uniform. Oh no. It'll be some poor freedman who's just so grateful for the chance that he'll fawn all over her just like she wants. B'vek, b'vek, b'vek!_

 

_Well I'm not going to die down here to oblige her. I'm going to live, and I'm going back to Ebonheart with glass and with gold, and Malurai will know I didn't make any of it up._

 

He wasn't perfectly sure why that last point seemed so important. Thoughts chased one another through his head without rhyme or reason as he listened to feet run up and down the hallway outside. He stiffened as he heard footsteps approaching the door. He pressed himself as tight to the wall as he could, gritting his teeth. Without strength or speed or healing he'd never survive meeting another one of those tentacle-faced monstrosities. The diamond of light was eclipsed as someone or something stared through the cutout in the door. He heard heavy breathing, labored and wheezing. Then the door opened and someone shuffled inside. It was one of the eyeless ones, he saw now, shock of white hair above its empty sockets as it muttered to itself. It had a dirty linen kilt falling almost to its knees, keys jingling on a piece of string tied around its waist.

 

“The benches are out of order, stack them all together again, where's the sword gone?”

 

It didn't get further than that, because at that point Noro stabbed it in the side of the head. It took a great deal more force to get ebony through skull without any magical assistance, but the ebony was still very sharp, and panic lent him greater force. He caught frantically at the falling body and pulled the door shut again after it, then squatted next to it trying to free the blade from its head without making any noise. A fumble at its belt eventually dislodged the keys. He wiped the blade on the kilt as best he could. Merciful Almalexia, but it stank.

 

He wanted skooma. Skooma would take the sting from the memory of the things he had seen today.

 

_Will it? It's one thing when it's your wife saying she's disappointed in you. I think the memory of all this will just get worse with drugs, not better. Get your head out of your ass._

 

How long until they noticed that one was gone? Somebody'd have to be at work dragging bodies out of the sanctuary, or preparing them for whatever rites they said over their dead. How long until he could risk trying to get out?

 

He shoved the body as far under a bench as he could, as quietly as he could manage, and locked the door from the inside. The running and shouting had faded, replaced by more purposeful distant dragging. It looked like he had a few minutes, at least. He rummaged through the benches very slowly in the darkness, feeling for any touch of cold glass or metal. He found a matched pair of glass daggers with scabbards, the two of them together lighter than his ebony sword. These he hung on his belt, shoving the heavier shortsword into the knapsack. He found a couple of flat shining things of black metal, hiltless, spiny, with crimson glowing inlays. At last he concluded they must be daedric throwing darts, though they were certainly too heavy for him to try actually throwing. He put them into the pack, too.

 

It was hard to concentrate. He was starting to ache, muscles protesting a level of activity well beyond walking with a pack on. His torn arms seemed to pull at every movement.

 

_**What sort of little mer are you?** _ The voice in his mind mocked him.

 

_You shut up. You're dead, and I'm alive._

 

There were a few little stacks of drakes, for some reason. He scooped them into his purse. Sandwiched between a bench and the one turned over on top of it he found a velvet bag that turned out to contain a handful of emeralds. He stared at them stupidly, then shoved those into the knapsack, too.

 

_I can't swim back to the mainland. Even if I was willing to abandon the weapons, I need the pack for the food and bedroll. It's going to be a very long trip back._

 

_They had to get all these people here. Walking them over the water would be very expensive, or a lot of work for a powerful mage. Much more likely they have boats. I can figure out how to row a boat. It can't be that hard._

 

He sank down against the wall by the door, squatting on his heels as he waited and listened. It was hard to imagine the contents of this room weren't the most valuable things in here, but they must not be. Only one person came, and they only tried the door and went away again when they found it locked. No one else came to see what had happened to the ashy creature that lay in a tangle of limbs under the bench to his right.

 

_Who ARE these people, that they're so rich? Do they not even let someone join unless they come bringing a Telvanni lord's treasure? Do the Hlaalu have this many rebellious sons and daughters?_

 

Who would bring glass and daedric weapons for the privilege of turning into a faceless horror? Noro shuddered as he thought about the feeling of the chant filling his head, the dizzying incense. Maybe they had branches in the cities, little rooms full of that stupefying scent and sound. Maybe if you spent an hour trapped in that atmosphere you would do any damn thing you were told, forever, and worship happily at an ash-pit eating throbbing flesh until someone came to take your eyes.

 

He'd go mad if he kept thinking about that. It sounded like the people or things out in the sanctuary were taking their time. He heard the hum of another chant as they worked, but he was glad that he could not understand the words.

 

He thought of a green yard with a stone bench, a little vine-covered arbor with leaves swaying in the cold wind of approaching winter.

 

He thought of a calm face, spotted and striped with the markings of her brother's coat. He thought of her bound hair and wondered what it would look like lying about her shoulders. He thought of her sitting naked on the edge of a bed, all the tattoos down her back visible to him, her tufted tail lying along a velvet coverlet.

 

Then he felt guilty.

 

_Not for the likes of you. She was born well, even if she's fallen on hard times. It's there in the way she talks, the way she carries herself. Even if she'd stoop that low, she deserves someone smart, who knows the right words and how to treat her._

 

Still... She had been kind to him. She deserved better than to have Sahrid hovering around making her life harder for the rest of eternity, trying to lure her and J'sulo both out to the mansion so she could arrange her little circle of admiring friends and family just as she liked. With as much money as she wanted, Sahrid would be a smiling tyrant.

 

_I could send them some money by courier. They could take their old father, wherever he is, and go someplace she can't find them. Back to Cyrodiil, maybe. Or even just to someplace like Balmora, if they want to live in a town._

 

He liked that idea. They would be free, their freedom from debt preserved by their ignorance. He would be free, with the means to get far, far away from Ebonheart. Maybe he'd take a boat to the Mainland and go see Narsis or some place. No, Firewatch. He'd heard Firewatch was a smaller town. Nobody'd care where he came from, and he could build a house with no close neighbors and have his green yard inside a big stone wall. He might have to hire the masonry done, but he was pretty sure he could figure out how to plant the vines.

 

_Of course, then she'll never know I was telling the truth about all of it, but that's not the most important thing._

 

He'd run across another Verei sooner or later. If he looked rich enough even an ugly face and the speech of a commoner from Vivec wouldn't discourage them. For some reason that thought made him feel tired, not happy. Well, being alone was better than being with someone who made you feel worse.

 

_So I can't say I haven't learned ANYTHING from Sahrid._

 

That thought brought him back to the present, where his thighs were cramping. He straightened slowly, wincing. It seemed quiet outside. He pressed his ear to the door for a moment, then risked peering out through the diamond cutout. He saw nothing in the little crooked alcove, and the corner obscured the hallway. He could hear distant chanting again, but no footsteps.

 

_This is probably the best it's going to get. It's possible there's someone in that sanctuary day and night._

 

He seized the knapsack and hung it over his right shoulder, the better to drop it easily, and shoved his left arm back through the strap of the glass shield. Then he took a deep breath through his mouth and stepped out into the dim flame-lit hallway.

 

There was no one in the main hall. He approached the doorway to the sanctuary slowly, realizing with a sinking feeling that the chanting was growing louder as he approached. He peered around the doorpost knowing what he was probably about to see.

 

Four Dunmer stood before the platform, swaying as they babbled the ancient gibberish. One was a woman and the other three men. This time they stood with arms crossed over their chests instead of upraised, and the words seemed different: He thought he could pick out _brother, sister, rest._ Each had a spiked club resting on the floor beside them.

 

The bodies of some of those he had killed were laid out on the platform itself, wrapped in dirty linen. In front of them there were some small heaps of ashes. Was that what became of the ones that were in mid-transformation, not yet become the monstrous flesh that would bubble and shrink?

 

_Four of them. One of me. No spells, and already tired. And if they call for help I'm finished._

 

_What choice do I have? If I try to find another way out I could wander into a crowd of monsters and an even worse death._

 

Noro shifted his shoulders, flexing the aching muscles, and stepped into the sanctuary. At the sound of the knapsack hitting the floor four pairs of eyes were suddenly on him. The chant did not end so much as it shifted.

 

“ _Brother, sister, strangers all, come too early, bleed and fall.”_

 

They swooped down to grab up their clubs almost in unison. No one called for help or raised their voice to give the alarm. That everafter struck him as eerie and unnatural, another bizarre thing in this alien place. In the moment he drew one of the twin blades and clenched his fist around the strap of his new glass shield, and Noro Laend stepped forward unspelled and alone.

 

The first encounter in this sanctuary had been ugly, but it was nothing to this. He felt slow, so slow, and as he tried to keep the clubs off his head and shoulders with the shield he learned that the worshippers were in fact very strong, stronger than their scrawny undernourished bodies should make possible. He kicked the woman away first and she lost her club as the others closed in, and then when he was trying to free his dagger from a taller man's eye socket she came back clawing and biting, trying to get at his throat with her teeth. It reminded him horribly of that night at the inn, and for a moment he was a little mad himself, kicking and slashing, blindly flailing with the shield as if it were another weapon. The barbs of their clubs tore at his arms and shoulders, and one hooked the flesh above his right eye and gouged a deep furrow all the way down his cheek as he jerked away.

 

It might have been two minutes. It might have been a half hour. But at the end of it he stood above four dead bodies, their chant continuing for a terrifying few seconds after he was sure their hearts had stopped. There was a club embedded so deeply into his leather shirt that the barbs had pierced his chest, and blood flew as he wrenched it loose and dropped it. He wiped the dagger on his own pants and sheathed it, then wiped frantically at his right eye with the sleeve, desperately afraid that he was blind. But no, when he had cleared the blood he could see again. The wounds in his body and his head hurt less than he had expected, but with head and heart pounding so hard together he probably would not have felt it if he were cut in half. He grabbed up the knapsack and headed up the ramps at a run.

 

He ran into one of the gray eyeless things in the upper hallway. In his panicked fury he broke its head with the shield, barely slowing down as its muttering about chairs and rugs choked off in a failing gurgle.

 

And then he was out, out of the stinking red darkness and into the fresher air of a cloudy night. The smell of salt air was more than welcome. He gasped it in as he looked around. Masser peered through a gap in the clouds, vast and close as it waxed, and by its thin light he saw the empty surface of the fortress's upper floor. The bodies had been taken away.

 

_Boat, I have to find a boat._

 

He ran around the edge of the fortress looking over the edge, trying to make out anything on the island below. There wasn't much to it around the edges of the fortification. In another hundred years the thing would be standing directly up out of the Inner Sea. After what seemed like a year he spotted a rickety little pier, probably as old as the fortress itself. Four boats were tied up to it.

 

_Four._ The thought of being pursued over water had not occurred to him. He ran down the steps, frantically trying to decide what to do. He had no axe with which to scuttle them. Setting them adrift seemed unlikely to be enough.

 

_Oars._ Every one of the boats had oars in its locks, settled in place with their blade ends resting alongside the boats. He dropped the knapsack and shield into the one that he thought looked sturdiest, then went to pry the oars away from all of the others and drop them into that one. Then he untied them and shoved them away from the dock. He climbed into his chosen vessel and then fumbled at the oars for another minute or so figuring out how to unship them. There were plenty of boats and gondolas around Vivec, but he'd occasionally ridden a water taxi, never driven one. People who could invest in a seaworthy boat were a class above his.

 

All right, you sat on the bench in the middle of the boat and you... What? He used an oar to shove away from the dock, then rotated them experimentally. All right, circling his hands backward made the boat go in the opposite direction from the one he was facing. That got him away from the dock. Now how did he turn around and go to the shore? The boat bobbed up and down on the water in a way that was more unbalancing and unpleasant than walking on the waves had been.

 

Considerable flailing around did not succeed in teaching him what he wanted. He finally resigned himself to traveling backward and looking over his shoulder every so often to make sure he was still aimed at the black line of the shore. There was no sound of pursuit yet, but the fortress was vast, and he was sure there were more people in it. At some point someone would wonder why the chanting had stopped.

 

The trip back seemed eternal. Forced to face the island as he rowed, he was in a constant state of terrified exhiliration. Every instant he thought he saw one of the tentacle-faced monsters against the clouds, ready to hurl deadly spells after him, but then it would turn out to just be a trick of his crazed imagination. 

 

When he was about halfway he dropped all the oars he'd collected over the side. They sank into the blackness without a sound. Probably really confuse some slaughterfish down there, he thought, and then laughed uncontrollably for several seconds, so hard that he couldn't row. What he thought was a movement on top of the fortress snapped him out of it, and he resumed rowing. His arms were on fire, and the wounds in his chest and head were starting to hurt now. An occasional sharp pain in his back said he'd probably taken a hit behind his right shoulder, too, and just not noticed it in the heat of the moment.

 

_Can't slow down yet. Have to get to shore._

 

He fell into a sort of miserable rhythm, a hell of throwing his body back and forward to haul on the oars as he rowed and rowed and rowed. It was impossible to say how long it went on as the fortress grew further and further away and at last was no more than an indistinct speck in the distance, and then the boat hit something and tilted hard to one side, jarring him from head to foot. He scrambled around, eyes wide with panic, but it was the shore. He had run aground on the beach.

 

Noro's socks and boots were soaked through by the time he'd managed to haul his knapsack and shield out onto the shore. The tide must be going out. There was a dark line of weed and shells and an occasional mud crab between the drier dirt and the water's edge. He rinsed the shield off in the sea, then fixed it to the strap that held his bedroll – at least that was mostly dry.

 

_How do I get to Ebonheart?_

 

He'd never get the path right trying to go back through the swamp. He'd have to follow the coast all the way back around. It would take much longer, but at least he wouldn't get lost and get eaten by a pack of kagouti or something. Gods only knew what Sahrid would have done by the time he made it there.

 

_Can't worry about Sahrid now. First things first._

 

At the first fresh rivulet he drank as much as he could hold, then rinsed the blood away as best he could. He ended up tearing a strip from his fresh linens to bind up his head. It turned out there was a spine from one of the clubs stuck in his back. He got it out by holding a dagger by the guard and prying it loose with the hilt. That hurt worse than anything he could remember, worse than being shot, worse than being stabbed. Afterward he must have blacked out for a few seconds. When he knew anything at all the dagger was lying a couple of inches from his hand, the spike was lying next to that, and he was stretched on his face in the packed damp sand beside the little streamlet. By some miracle he had neither landed on the dagger nor drowned face-down in the water.

 

He walked for a little while up the beach, but the further he got from the boat, the worse he felt. Now that he was moving slower he was starting to feel the penetrating cold. The aches in his body redoubled, and his legs seemed to grow weaker every minute. The first time he stumbled and fell he got up and kept going, driven on by the thought of what might be coming after him across the water. The second time he stayed on his knees for several seconds, knapsack weighing him down like a boulder on his back.

 

_I can't pass out on the beach. Even a mudcrab will take a bite of someone laid out flat._ He turned toward the treeline, staggering up the shallow slope as he looked for any dry place. In the end he lay wrapped in his damp cloak, curled up among the many spiny knees of a dead cypress. Everything hurt, and without a fire and in damp clothes he shivered constantly. He dozed uneasily until the first rays of sun fell on him. It brought light but little heat. He climbed to his feet, teeth bared in a silent scream as his entire body rebelled against a night of unaccustomed furious activity. He staggered around in a circle for a couple of minutes, slapping at his own arms to try and loosen up enough for his fingers to work. Eventually he managed to drag a packet of dried food out of the knapsack and eat. His stomach had been empty a long time, and it lurched in protest at first, but after the first few slow bites he started to feel better. He had to chew on the left side of his face. On the right the clotted gouge pulled painfully, and he was wary of reopening it.

 

He ate an entire day's portion of dried meat and fruit very slowly as he walked. He knew he would have to ration out the rest of it carefully, but for now he needed the strength to get as far from Telesnaryan as possible. He pulled off the linen from around his head and tossed it when he was reasonably sure the bleeding had stopped. Maybe he could be tracked by it, but any creature that couldn't track him in his current state, sweaty, bleeding and with his boots encrusted with salt, would have to have no nose at all.

 

It had been a boring walk getting there. It was a boring walk getting away. Soreness gradually faded, but Noro's strength did not seem to fully return. His breath rasped in a dry throat that seemed to get thicker and more scratchy over the three days or so after. In the evening he ran fevers, sweat trickling down his face even as he shivered with the cold. The fourth night it was colder than before, breath puffing from his lips in a cloud. He clumsily managed to build a fire on his own with a pile of driftwood and the tinder box from his knapsack. For once he was grateful for Sahrid's desire to make him carry the heavier burden. A lot of their provisions were now his. He washed as best he could at another rivulet, filled the water skins, and crawled into the bedroll with his second set of clothes on, daggers clutched against his chest. He fell asleep facing the flames, finally unbending from the tension of many days.

 

He was awakened by a horrible pain in the back of his head. Noro screamed and grabbed at it, finding something horribly dense and squashy that writhed under his hands. He could feel the round circle of teeth embedded in his scalp. He fumbled onehanded for his dagger and stabbed blindly at it until the grip on his head loosened, and then he threw it as far as his weak arms could manage.

 

Noro frantically poked up the fire, blood running down his face from the new cuts in his scalp. The fat wormlike thing that now lay curled in its last agonies, leaking on the sand, was a familiar shape. It had three black eyes and a puckered, toothy circle of a mouth. He'd seen them for sale whole, cooked or dried in the market in St. Olms. The kwama foragers had seemed stupid-looking and harmless at the time.

 

On the other hand, he also remembered that they were good eating. He went to rinse the blood out of his hair as best he could, then when that proved hopeless he shaved his head with the edge of one of the glass daggers. It was terrifyingly sharp, and his hands were shaky, so this took some time. When he was bald he tied up the deep bite-marks with his dirty tunic, leaving the body of it hanging down his back.

 

He cut some hunks of meat out of the fatter rings of muscle near the thing's head. They weren't bad once he'd charred them on a stick over the fire. He'd never been able to cook. On the other hand, it had been trying to eat him, and now he was eating it instead. He giggled at that for some time until he realized he was starting to sound crazy.

 

There wasn't much point in trying to go back to sleep, so he packed up camp, stuffed himself with as much kwama forager as he could, and tossed the carcass into the sea. The fire pit looked a lot like a place someone had built a fire recently, and it was above the tide line. Noro stared at it for a while, coughing against a dry throat. Then he kicked sand over it and dragged some driftwood over to partly cover the disturbed place before he shouldered the heavy burden of his knapsack and walked on.

 

The cough and the fever didn't seem to get a lot worse, but they stayed with him, sapping his strength, making it harder to cover ground. It did not help that after that second night he slept very restlessly. His half-healed wounds must give forth the appetizing scent of wounded prey, because he had to kill two more kwama foragers over the next five days. By the third one on Night Seven he was stabbing at it before he was even completely awake. None managed to really latch on before it died. Having his head wrapped up seemed to help. Probably the Ashlanders didn't just wear so much headgear to keep the ash storms out. He didn't lack for food, anyway. He gradually figured out that the meat was better if he just held it in the fire long enough for it to start to brown on the outside. It wasn't done all the way, but it still tasted good, and it wasn't charred. Salt from his pack helped. 

 

Sahrid was no doubt busy furnishing her big fancy house. He wondered how convincingly sad she had been when she told Malurai and the Argonian servants that he was dead. Probably she could cry at will, but he didn't merit that level of charade. He'd just been an upper servant to her, after all. A poorly trained one, requiring magical manipulation to do as he was told. He couldn't muster the furious hatred he had felt in the first few days of their acquaintance. These thoughts stirred only a dull loathing, a faint burning in his gut.

 

On the tenth day after his escape from Telesnaryan he glimpsed the distant tower of Chmthuz, standing crooked above the treetops. He stopped and looked at it for a while. He could probably make it there on his own. What he wasn't sure of was his ability to navigate back to Ebonheart from the tower without getting lost in the swamp and drowned, or eaten, or drowned and THEN eaten. He turned to continue his progress along the beach instead.

 

He saw some netches quite close that day. He strayed near the treeline when it started to rain and heard the scrapey baa-ing of one of the betties. Noro looked up to see a cluster of four of them drifting among the cypress around a small river that streamed from the marsh out to the sea, fanning out to its own muddy little delta. Up close they were as big as a hut, the pulsing of their blue glowing bodies producing billowing swathes of flesh bigger than the ripples of the biggest mattress. The single bull, beyond and slightly above them, was big as the body of a silt strider, he realized. They didn't seem to notice him, or if they did, they didn't care. He stood and watched them for a few minutes, smothering his coughs in his sleeve. It gave him a strange feeling, alone but not lonely, sharing this moment only with the netch and the sky and the sea. He was in a more thoughtful mood when he walked on.

 

Noro lost track of how many days he followed the coastline South after that. Some days it was colder than others, though it seemed to be getting gradually colder overall. His wounds gradually closed, but his fever grew worse, making the distance he could travel each day shorter. He never slept more than a couple of hours at a time, day or night. He still had food left, but he had no desire to eat it. He forced himself to do so only because he didn't want to become so weak he couldn't fight off the foragers. 

 

By the time he saw the top of a lighthouse towering up out of the distant trees, Imperial-style peaked roof silhouetted against the sunset, he had not spoken in more than two weeks. He was dirty, hollow-cheeked, his eyes two sullen coals deep in their sockets, the woolen tunic on his head soaked from rain and permanently stained. He felt he would never be free of the stink of blood, wet or dry. He glimpsed himself in the dull reflection of a stagnant pool once. He did not recognize his own face. His fingers traced the line of the long gouge-mark from right eyebrow to his jawline, nearly eight inches in its curving path, healed shut but still lumpy around the dull red of the scabby seam. It should've been stitched. He'd had no way to do it.

 

_Well, I can't really claim it's ruined my looks, now, can I?_

 

The shape of his body had gradually changed, every ounce of fat burned away with work and exercise. Rangy muscle had built his shoulders outward. He would never be a big mer, but he no longer looked like a lazy skooma addict, either.

 

He transferred a few drakes and an emerald into the pockets of his pants so that he wouldn't have to rummage in the knapsack in front of anyone. Then he turned his steps toward the lighthouse. Presently he found a path winding away from the beach, wide enough for three mer to walk abreast. There were ropes strung between old wooden posts to mark the way, and someone had kept up the path enough to keep most of the weeds from growing on it. He turned to make his way along it, shield on his knapsack, knapsack on his back. The changing wind eventually brought him the smell of wood smoke. He thought for a bit as he walked, and then reluctantly took the ruined tunic from his head and wadded it up to toss into a fern beside the path. His hair was just stubble around his slowly healing bites, but it looked less crazy exposed than with a collar flapping over his forehead.

 

He heart footsteps from up ahead, heavy booted footfalls. He persisted forward, hands on the straps of his knapsack. Around a bend in the path, around the bole of a broad tree, came a man in steel armor. The sunset gleamed red and gold on the shining metal. He had a helmet with a stiff brush of crimson horsehair, and a pattern of vines and some round fruit that didn't grow in Vvardenfell in a raised design on his breastplate and the visor of his helm. He wore practical woolen trousers beneath a skirt of studded leather flaps, and the edges of a gray padded shirt were visible around his vambraces and where his gorget met his pauldrons, the practical winter gear of the Imperial Legion. He was carrying a shield embossed with the device of the Septim dynasty, the shape of the dragon god Akatosh, and there was a longsword at his hip.

 

Noro coughed. The legionnaire stopped, hand on his sword as he looked up. At this distance it was evident he was a big man, sturdily built as Imperials typically were.

 

“You look like you've been to the wars, Serjo,” he said, in Cyrodilic, then repeating himself in Dunmeris.

 

“Close,” Noro said in the latter tongue. His voice came out sounding deeper than he remembered, scratchy and disused.

 

“We don't see glass equipment out here very often.”

 

“No? What town is up ahead?” Noro asked. “I've wandered some while.”

 

“You're nearly to the Imperial outpost at Seyda Neen,” the Legionnaire said. He lowered his hand from his weapon and came a little closer, tipping up his visor to get a better look at the stranger. His eyes were very blue, an exotic human color. “You need a healer.”

 

“Is there one?” Noro asked, moving forward cautiously. He coughed into his sleeve again.

 

“Not in Seyda Neen,” said the Legionnaire. “But we're only two hours by Silt Strider from Vivec. You don't look well. I could probably detail one of the lads to go with you. Not that much happens out here.”

 

“I'm well enough to manage the ride, I think,” Noro said. The man turned and fell in beside him as they both walked up the path.

 

“What happened?”

 

“I've been hunting the bad ones and them that pray to them,” Noro said. That wasn't a lie. It wasn't his fault they weren't actually daedra. “Out at Telesnaryan.”

 

“Now, that's a name I haven't heard,” the Legionnaire said.

 

“I'd keep it to yourself, I was you. Some young idiot's liable to get themselves killed,” Noro said. “I nearly was. Anyhow, it's not that easy to get to. It's on an island way out from Chmthuz.”

 

“I've heard of Chmthuz,” said the Imperial. “Blessed Akatosh, you _have_ come a long way. I don't know if I'd risk these swamps alone and wounded.”

 

“I came along the beach,” Noro said. “Even then, I've been fighting off kwama foragers every time I lie down.” He pointed to the circle of bite marks on his head.

 

“I see you have,” the Legionnaire said. “You must be eager to get back to civilization.”

 

Noro grunted agreement. “When's the next strider for Vivec, Serjo?”

 

“Not until tomorrow early, I'm afraid. Arrille can put you up at the Tradehouse. It's not much, but the beds are clean and the food is good. You may want to stay out of the upstairs taproom. Wearing glass around is liable to attract more attention than you want.”

 

“Thanks for the warning,” Noro said. The path was curving gently around toward a wooden bridge with no rails that lay across a big creek or a small river. It curled sluggishly around to their right and then fanned out into nothing in the mud and the draggle-tails by the sea. The curve of the little river enclosed the border of a small town. Out at the muddy edges there were wooden shacks. Closer in, around the dry raised roadbed, the buildings were made of irregular stones mortared with mud, or lath and dull yellow plaster. The roofs were pointed and thatched, dense with moss and vines in this humid climate even in the cold. Smoke rose from tall stone chimneys.

 

“Which is the Tradehouse?” Noro asked as they crossed the creaking bridge.

 

“The bigger one on your right,” the Legionnaire pointed. “Stone foundation, plaster walls. If you need to talk to an officer of the Imperial Law, two of us are usually patrolling, or there's the Empire's Coastguard station all the way at the end of the street and on your left. It's the second-tallest thing in town after the Great Pharos. That's the lighthouse at the harbor mouth.”

 

“Thanks, Serjo,” Noro said, and coughed into his sleeve as he turned toward the Tradehouse. It did not occur to him until he had mounted the steps to the wooden porch that the officer had spoken to him as to an equal, literally the first time in his entire life that this had happened with anyone associated with the law.

 


	12. Chapter 12

The wooden door of the Tradehouse opened to admit him into a blast of warmth and light. Noro stood blinking stupidly for a second as he pushed the door shut behind him. It had been so long since he had been warm. He was starting to feel thick and slow when a jolt of adrenaline brought him to wakefulness. _We know what happens to people who fall asleep in the wrong place._

  
  


In front of him was a bare counter of some dark, unpolished wood. Behind it stood an Altmer, tall and golden-skinned, with his white hair drawn back in a high queue. He wore a fine blue silk doublet with slashed sleeves revealing a darker teal layer beneath, fine but somewhat worn. Off to one side there was a table covered with chitin weapons. A Dunmer woman in a faded blue homespun blouse and a brown skirt sat there polishing an axe made from some part of a strider carapace, carefully gliding the translucent yellow-brown blade along a whetstone.

  
  


“Welcome to Arrille's Tradehouse,” the Altmer said. “What can I get for you, traveler?” He had been in Vvardenfell long enough that he spoke Dunmeris with no foreign accent, only the faintest suggestion of a class and education much higher than Noro's. The tapestries that lined the plaster walls were very fine, but very old, depicting plants and animals Noro had never seen.

  
  


Noro's eyes traveled past the Altmer to the shelves behind him with their organized piles of goods: glass jars, bottles, jugs of liquor, packets of dried food, tarnished old iron armor, shiny new chitin, folded stacks and bolts of cloth.

  
  


“A wash and a room,” Noro said. “Do you sell clothes? I need pants, socks, a shirt or cotte and some linens. And laundry done, if anyone here does that.”

  
  


The other mer's eyes were fixed on Noro's hip level, where he had just registered the two spiny hilts of the glass daggers.

  
  


“The bath house is out back, by the river, Serjo,” he said slowly. “One night stay with meal and bath, ten drakes. One full outfit, sized for a Dunmer of average height, forty drakes with no belt or shoes. Laundry service, five drakes, ten for unusually soiled clothing. We are a Hlaalu-sanctioned establishment, and the House charter requires me to inform all guests that the Imperial law allows us to deal with theft in-house.”

  
  


“Right.” Noro set his purse on the counter – it was leather, still intact, but now very dirty – and counted out six ten-drake coins. He stacked them on one another and slid them carefully over the table toward the Altmer. Arrille scooped them into a box full of other coins and set it back on the shelf behind him. He collected things from different piles and then set the stack of folded things on the table in front of Noro. On top of that he set a key.

  
  


“Your room is first on the right around this corner. Enjoy your stay. You may give your soiled things to Tolvise when you've had a chance to change.”

  
  


“Thanks,” grunted Noro. He was strongly aware of their eyes on the glass shield as he went back out to find the bathhouse. It was a rickety wooden structure with four curtained booths. At one end stood an ancient boiler with a single large hot water spigot and a stack of wooden buckets. A bored Argonian with broad blue head-frills sat next to it, the end of his fat scaly tail sitting atop one of his own clawed feet to keep it off the cold floor. The frills fanned out as he heard the door open, and he sat up alertly. He was dressed in the same sort of homespuns as the Dunmer freewoman working in the Tradehouse proper. Noro registered the bracer on one arm, probably enchanted to keep him from getting far from his master. _Arrille is probably the only one in Seyda Neen rich enough to afford a slave._

  
  


Noro set the knapsack on the little table provided, and the stack of new things on top of that. He helped the Argonian fill the hip bath. When the betmer protested quietly - “Serjo, one would get in trouble” - he waved a hand dismissively.

  
  


“I won't tell if you don't. I'm cold, and it'll take less time.”

  
  


Washing up seemed more of an effort than he remembered. The ancient boiler made the water lukewarm at best as he stood in a tin half-bath ladling water over himself. He had to be careful of the bits of him that were not completely healed, trying not to disturb the progress of clots. As he washed he found other little injuries he had forgotten, or never noticed. His right big toenail was gone and two of the smaller ones on the left foot as well. There was a gash in his right calf that he could not recall receiving. There were various smaller scratches that could probably be attributed to cypress knees and splinters. By the time he had cleaned himself up as best he could and put on his new things he felt exhausted. Each impulse to relax caused him to twitch alert again, looking around for kwama foragers or cultists with clubs. He saw something sharp-toothed or mad and armed in every shadow.

  
  


He wiped out his leather shirt as best he could and put it back on over his new woolen one. Then he folded his filthy, bloody tunic around the rest of it and carried it all back into the Tradehouse to offer to the woman who must be Tolvise. She had an angular, homely face, good-humored but not pretty. She took it readily enough and hurried it away out of sight and smell.

  
  


Then Noro took his key and went to find the room. There were only a couple, both next to the stairs leading up, and he could hear voices talking and laughing up in the taproom upstairs. The room proved to contain a small wood-framed bed with a fat straw-stuffed mattress that smelled a bit musty, a two-drawer dresser with a pitcher of water and a glass and bowl on top of it, and a pile of colorful quilts.

  
  


He locked himself in, shoved the key in his pocket, and put the knapsack and shield against the farthest wall from the door. Then he pushed the dresser in front of it. It wouldn't keep anyone out, it wasn't heavy enough, but it would make a noise if someone tried to push past it. There was no window, just a tiny air-hole connecting it with the main hallway, and for the moment he was grateful. He took off his boots and lay down fully clothed under the sheets with his daggers pulled in against his chest. When he was feverish it felt as though nothing could make him warm, but at last the entire pile of quilts restored him to a level of comfort he had not felt in ages. He plumped up the pillow as best he could to keep himself from lying flat, because lying flat made it harder to breathe. It could not be said that he slept the whole night uninterrupted. He certainly slept better than he had in many days. He never went to collect the meal that came with the room. He didn't want to talk to anyone.

  
  


Next morning he woke shaking and disoriented from a dream of naked mer with clubs chanting in a circle around him, his flesh melting as he looked down at his hands. He lay panting for several seconds before he realized he had a dagger in his right hand. He didn't remember drawing it.

  
  


There was a neat stack of laundry folded up inside his cloak and tied with a ribbon hanging from the doorknob outside his room. He put the cloak on and stuffed the rest into the knapsack. Then he ate some dried scrib, dampened his fingers to run through his stubble of hair – he was careful of the healing wounds - and set about getting himself ready to go. When he walked out into the town it looked to be very early morning, still dark and very cold. He held his cloak tight around him as he headed toward the sound of a silt strider calling, a deep, hollow keening like a soul lost in grief. A narrow path led up a steep hill just outside the town proper, wooden stairs built in up to a worn platform without rails. The giant insect stood there on legs as long as the tallest building in town, fiddling a pair of scythelike front legs together with a soft scrape. A seating area had been carved out of its back and innards just behind the head, healed over into a hard chitinous surface everywhere except for the exposed band of pinkish flesh near the front. There were brass levers sticking out of it. He tried not to look too closely at that as he approached.

  
  


“Good morning, Muthsera, where would you like to go?” asked the stridermer. He was a youngish Dunmer with a pattern of ritual scars suggesting he had probably been born an Ashlander, but he was dressed like any hardworking businessmer, in blue homespun tunic and trousers and a heavier woolen cloak against the cold.

  
  


“Vivec,” Noro said. The man brightened visibly. In Vivec he could pick up a great deal more passengers for Balmora and other destinations, many more than in Hla Oad or another rural port.

  
  


“Of course, Muthsera! Please have a seat! May I take your luggage?”

  
  


“No, I'll pay for a seat for that, too,” Noro said. “I want to keep it by me.” He handed over double the asked fare. He probably could've kept it for free – there couldn't be many paying customers traveling from here to Vivec when there wasn't an Imperial ship in port – but he remembered what it meant to work for people with more money than you'd ever see. He sat down on a chitin bench, pulling his cloak close around. The body of the giant arthropod was warm, warmer than a boat or cart would be.

  
  


The only other fare, in the event, was a middle-aged balding Imperial in brown robes, carrying a big hard-bound ledger. He and Noro greeted one another politely and otherwise did not speak.

  
  


The silt strider carried them overland with long steps, its mournful call occasionally booming around them. The seats inside its carapace tilted only a little with its movement. Noro held his knapsack pinned in the corner beside him, the shield occasionally digging into his shoulder. He watched the swamp fall away into the green fields and forests of the West Gash. The familiar giant mushrooms began to reappear, towering singly or in clusters among the thin trees.

  
  


_Where in Vivec can I sell an ebony shortsword and two daedric throwing darts_ ? Even if an honest smith would buy it of him and not denounce him to the guards as a probable thief, who would have that much money to give him for it?  _Easiest to sell it to a fence. So how do I find one who buys things that valuable?_ He'd never stooped to petty theft to get skooma, depending on how petty you called stealing Verei's dowry. He'd always used money from his string of lousy jobs. He didn't know anyone he was sure was a fence.

  
  


_But I did know people who sold skooma. And I know skooma dens are places where thieves hide. I can start there._

  
  


He did not look forward to being enveloped in the tantalizing clouds of fragrant smoke, but it had been long enough that he thought himself equal to enduring it. Besides, he'd always drunk the stuff instead, because a pipe was another thing to carry around and it was easy to get caught with it. A bottle you drank from could be a bottle of anything to a passing Ordinator. A skooma pipe could not.

  
  


The strider deposited them at another high platform outside the Foreign Quarter. The grass had gone brown in the cold, crunching underfoot in the first frost as he descended toward the road. Noro stopped at the bridge, out of the way of traffic, as he stared up at the brown clay monstrosity that was the canton. It felt almost alien to him now. He held the strap of the glass shield, the better to avoid losing it to a cutpurse, and cinched up the knapsack as tight shut as he could against pickpockets. He did not go slinking in like a whipped dog, nor hauled along in Sahrid's wake. He walked calmly up the bridge with his pack on his shoulders and his shield on his arm, and people got out of his way even when they heard him cough. They tended to stare at the half-healed scar on his face even before the glass shield. Probably they always would. The Ordinators didn't seem any friendlier, coldly watching from behind their golden masks, but he suspected only the most prominent of the Temple faithful earned any real courtesy from them.

  
  


Noro walked slowly around the yards-wide walkway that lined the outside of the canton. Colorful scraps of fabric fluttered from the roofs of the little booths and vendor stalls, richer and better-provisioned here than in St. Delyn. There was a greater mix of races as well here in the Foreign Quarter, free betmer and men and mer buying and selling. Among the various Imperials and Altmer and Bosmer he saw one or two Dunmer that he was sure were Outlanders, dressed in the Cyrodilic fashion in knee-length chainmail tunics and wrinkled leggings above their high leather boots. He moved aside for a pair of high Telvanni lords in stiffened maroon satin robes inlaid with topazes, with strong well-fed slaves going in front and behind to clear a way for them and guard them from pickpockets.

  
  


It didn't take long to find what he was looking for. Vivec had no alleys, but there were always little shadowed places between the booths, like the one where that poor idiot had tried to rob him and Sahrid an eternity ago. There were a number of youngish mer loitering about without seemingly anything to do other than pick their teeth or ply a belt knife on their nails. He chose one with finer clothes, a young Altmer woman in black wool robes embroidered with white geometrics. Despite the weather her collar was split and cut very low, showing small cleavage pressed up and together as hard as garments could make it go. She had her golden hair braided and then twisted into a bun atop her head. And more importantly, as he drew nearer he caught a faint whiff of skooma. She was seemingly staring at nothing, put the pale green eyes snapped to his face, then his purse, then his shield as he drew nearer, definitely in that order.

  
  


“You looking for something, Serjo?” she asked.

  
  


“Yes,” he said quietly. “I've found a sword I don't need, and I'd like to find someone who would like to buy it.”

  
  


“But there are many smiths in Vivec, Serjo,” she said.

  
  


“It's made of ebony,” Noro said, and coughed into his sleeve.

  
  


“Just this way, Serjo,” the Altmer said. She peeled away from the wall in one smooth movement. He followed her up the walk for a few hundred yards, and then into one of the shadowed doorways that led into the Lower Waistworks. Here there were merchants who were better off than those outside and could afford the higher rents to work from a shop space inside the canton proper, selling a better class of goods than those available outside. It was much harder to steal in here, where there were walls and a ceiling and there were more Ordinators per square yard, and so the goods were finer even out on the table-stalls between the shops that had doors. There was blown glass, enameled ceramic dishes, tableware made of steel and silver instead of brass and wood, finer spices in smaller bottles brought all the way from Cyrodiil and the Black Marsh.

  
  


The Altmer led Noro back down a long hallway that held an alchemist and an enchanting shop. At the very end of the hall, beside a sign that held a rough likeness of a shalk, there was a door that gently wafted the scent of mixed booze and skooma.

  
  


“Ten drakes, and I give you a name,” she said. Noro shrugged and handed over the money. “Tell the bartender you want Seliere's Blackwine. He'll send you downstairs.” She turned to go without stopping to see if he was going to thank her. Noro shrugged and went inside.

  
  


The Black Shalk Cornerclub was a long, narrow room with a worn dark red rug covering most of the floor. A bar stretched most of the length of the room, wooden stools pulled up to the worn polished surface. There were round wooden tables scattered about the open space, and threadbare tapestries with dull abstract patterns on the walls. Behind the bar there were the usual shelves full of bottles and a couple of tapped barrels, and a Dunmer a bit older than Noro with his linen sleeves rolled up and a dirty green apron. He had greased his hair and pushed it back so it stood straight back from his head in a fan. The patrons were a motley lot, dressed in various levels of lowerclass clothing and netch leather armor, the same stuff his damaged shirt was made from. Many were armed, always with steel and chitin. With a glass shield in his hand he stood out like a naked Khajiit in a Tribunal Temple.

  
  


He went up to the bar and seated himself on a stool. The bartender finished pouring for another Dunmer down at the other end and came to stand in front of him.

  
  


“Well, Serjo, what can I get you?”

  
  


“Seliere's Blackwine,” Noro said.

  
  


“We keep that downstairs. You want to talk to Marianne Somerville, the Breton with the gold earring,” he said. “Back there.”

  
  


Noro followed his pointing finger to the back of the room, where there was a stairway leading down that was half-choked with skooma smoke. It made two turns on the way down, so that he ended up facing the way he'd come in upstairs. Far from awakening a craving as he had expected, the smoke had him painfully coughing before he reached the bottom. He snorted, swallowing bitter mucus as he squinted at the room. It was about half the length of the upstairs one, probably because of the series of alcoves along the back wall. Smoke drifted above the black-beaded curtains. In front of that there were more tables and a much smaller bar with a burly Orc behind it polishing the bar-top. He had one tusk, and his bald green head was crisscrossed with irregular scars that looked to have come from broken glass. There was no shortage of patrons. Several stared at him as he looked around.

  
  


There was indeed a Breton woman with a gold earring sitting alone at a table near the back, holding a black glass bottle in her hand propped on her knee. She was a tall, thin woman, with the willowy look often found among the race of humans with the most merish blood. She wore riveted netch leather trousers and a Cyrodilic-style mail shirt that had some of the rings removed to reduce it to hip-length, the lower edge of it jagged and irregular. Her hair was blond, tied in a sloppy knot at the back of her head, and her eyes were green as the shield in Noro's hand. She glanced up as he approached, her eyes attracted by the gleam of glass. One pale eyebrow rose.

  
  


“Don't believe I've seen you in here before, friend,” said Marianne Somerville. “If you're looking for a smoke you ought to talk to Balgo at the bar.”

  
  


“Not here for that,” Noro said. “I've got an ebony shortsword and two daedric darts I'd like to sell.”

  
  


“You don't want to sell me those daggers?” she asked, eyeing the weapons on his belt.

  
  


“Not today,” Noro said. She snorted.

  
  


“All right, let's see what you've got.”

  
  


He set the knapsack on her table and reached in to haul out the shortsword in its scabbard and the two darts, laying them on the table with the points toward himself. She looked at him with raised eyebrows, reaching for the shortsword. He nodded. Somerville tugged the weapon free of its sheath, turning it in her hand slowly.

  
  


“Well, the damn thing's heavy enough,” she said. She turned it and stabbed it point-down into the tabletop. It slid in extremely easily. No one seemed to find this odd, or indeed to pay any attention to them at all. Somerville tugged the blade loose and looked it over, peering at her reflection in the black blade. She flicked it with a fingertip and listened to the sound it made. Then she slid it back into the sheath. “Real enough. Five thousand.”

  
  


“It's worth twice that,” Noro said.

  
  


“And I might eventually get that for it, but I have time and you do not. Five thousand for this. A thousand each for the darts.”

  
  


Noro thought about that, tapping one finger on the tabletop with eyes narrowed.

  
  


_That gives me twenty-seven thousand all told. Much more than enough._

  
  


“Throw in one of those daggers and I make it ten,” she said. “And that's being very damned generous. Those darts are hard to move. I'll have to hunt up a collector.”

  
  


“I need the daggers,” Noro said. But I'll take your seven for the rest. Where in Vivec do I sell emeralds?”

  
  


“Any legit jeweler will probably take at least one or two,” said Somerville. “But you're probably going to have to hit a few cantons to get rid of them all, unless someone's got a big order in.” She reached for the purse at her hip and dug out a handful of coin, then spilled it carelessly on the tabletop and began to sort through looking for the hundred-drake coins. They were made of gold, very visible among the verdigrised copper one and ten-drake markers. There were a few Imperial gold septims in among the other things, marked with the profile of the present Emperor. “Let's see. Bunch of pikers around here always paying in small coin... Here's one thousand piece. Here's another. Looks like you'll have to take the rest in hundreds.”

  
  


Noro shrugged. He bit one of the gold coins and checked the teeth marks he'd left, layered over teeth marks from a number of other skeptical souls, and found no dark marks suggesting it was gold over a layer of lead or something else heavy. Then he shoveled the 50 hundred-drake and two thousand-drake markers into his purse.

  
  


“Pleasure doing business,” said Marianne Somerville, taking up one of the daedric darts to look at it lovingly as she turned it over her fingers. “Sure you don't want a smoke?”

  
  


_Do I want to wake up without everything I came in with?_ Noro shook his head and turned for the door. He was aware of many eyes on him as he went, the mer with seven thousand drakes in his purse and a glass shield and two glass daggers.

  
  


He had a dull and busy day hunting up jewelers. He only sold four emeralds to the first two at a hundred each – apparently they were about a “half carat” each and the price of them had fallen with the discovery of new mines in Elsewyr. He was certain he was being cheated owing to his obvious ignorance, but by then he was exhausted and dizzy and tired of walking, and the stuff he was coughing up had a metallic taste when he swallowed. He struck it lucky with the third one, in Hlaalu canton, who was trying to fill an order for a large jewelry set for a Redoran wedding and who cleared the remaining (forty carats? He couldn't remember) at six thousand the lot. He took the stack of six thousand-drake coins and put it with the others, then paused at the counter while the man was helping someone else to split half his coin into the bag that had held the emeralds and stuff it into his knapsack. There was still a small loose emerald in his purse, but he could not care.

  
  


He stumbled down to the little docks off Hlaalu canton to charter a boat to Ebonheart. He was sure afterward that he probably paid twice what he should have, but by that point he could hardly stand. He slumped down in a corner of the deck, the green shield on one arm and the other arm draped over the knapsack, and dreamed uneasily until a loud voice woke him. The boatmer had looked at his gaunt and haunted face and chosen not to try to poke him awake. He climbed carefully to his feet, then stood leaning on the cabin for a minute, paled nearly from gray to white.

  
  


“Serjo, you don't look well,” the boatmer said. “Can I call a healer for you?”

  
  


“No, I know one,” Noro said. He forced himself upright, coughing, and gave the mer another coin as he headed off down the gangplank. He was surprised to see it was night, cold and clear and starry. Masser was nearly full and Secundus a waxing crescent overhead as he made his way across the plaza. Starlight glistened on the great ebony statue of the dragon. The world felt nightmarish and unreal. He was not twitching at everything that moved like the last time he had entered this city, but he felt that was partly because he had not the energy. Every face seemed to belong to a leering demon.

  
  


People looked twice at his shield, but those who might have inconvenienced a sick mer stumbling around at night looked at his ruined face and thought better of it.

  
  


Mostly. He was wandering uphill from the docks, trying to remember how to get to the shop, when a hand snatched at his shield arm. He flailed the shield without thinking at all. By the time he had really registered what had happened he was standing over a dirty Imperial who had both hands clamped over his smashed and bleeding nose, and a guard in steel armor was headed rapidly toward them, hand on his sword. They stood just out of the light, near one of the street lamps.

  
  


“What happened here?” the guard demanded.

  
  


“I dunno,” Noro said, rubbing his face with his free hand. “He grabbed me. I guess I hit him.”

  
  


The ragged man whimpered something in Cyrodilic that Noro did not understand. The guard nudged him with a boot.

  
  


“Now then, Rufus, you know better than that. If you get nicked for snatching purses again this month you're going to get shipped to the Imperial Prison, and you don't want to go there.”

  
  


“For your healing,” Noro said wearily, and dropped a few drakes next to him. “Serjo, do you know the way to a healer's shop run by two Khajiit? There's a symbol of Stendarr over the door. I used to know the way, but I can't remember it now.”

  
  


“Oh, you mean Malurai and J'sulo's place,” the guard said, as the unfortunate Rufus scrambled to pick up coins and vanished down a side street. “Go straight ahead until you see the sign with the morning glory vine, then turn right. It's not far up Vine Street. Maybe a half mile from here, all told.”

  
  


“Thanks.”

  
  


He got there somehow, he was never entirely sure how. At some point he was leaning on the doorpost, pulling the cord next to it. A bell rang somewhere inside. Noro waited, watching the world revolve. It seemed smaller than he remembered. And darker. And heavier. It was hard to breathe.

  
  


The front window lit up dimly behind the shutters. Then the door opened and Malurai was standing there in short linen trousers gathered in around her knees and a loose white linen cotte and, poorly matched, her sword belt. He could see the alfiq behind her on the countertop, yawning hugely.

  
  


“Can I help you, Serjo?” she asked. Her eyes traveled over his face and head, small wrinkle forming between her brows.

  
  


Noro stared at her for long seconds. No, she didn't recognize him. Of course she didn't. She'd probably been told he was dead, he thought distantly. 

  
  


“Yes,” he said. “I'm Noro Laend.”

  
  


He was aware of things around him traveling upward, fast, and something soft and warm against his cheek. Darkness closed in.

 


	13. Chapter 13

 

Malurai caught at the falling mer as he slumped, her arms around his upper body as she tried to keep hold with the awkward knapsack in the way. His head fell forward against her breast, and then the green glass shield slid from his arm and hit the floor with a clatter.

  


“J'sulo, the door,” she said. It clicked shut. She heard the bar fall across as she lowered the Dunmer to the ground so that she could get a better grip for carrying him. Her tail lashed as she looked at his face. “Stendarr's Mercy, I think it _is_ Noro Laend.” She pulled the knapsack off his shoulders so that she could haul him up over her own shoulder and carry him toward the back. He was heavier than last time, more muscled, but she had carried heavier patients. The sleepy cobwebs cleared gradually as she laid him out on the same bed as last time. He coughed, and her nose twitched at the stink of fresh blood. She could hear the rough wheeze of his breathing, clotted mess in his throat and lungs.

  


_Cure first. Then examine. Then heal._ Malurai dragged a chair over to set in front of the bed so that she could sit. She held a hand out over his chest. She was aware of every spell she had ever learned, magicka percolating beneath her skin in all of its various guises: the hard bright thing that was Ra'saja's Resistance, the soft tiny light of her very first and weakest healing spell, Hearth Heal, and among a few others, the green warm glow of Stendarr's Second Cure. She drew on it, imagining the power drawing out from her body and into her fingers, and in response the helix of green light formed between her hand and the unconscious Dunmer's body. She felt the power go out from her, a feeling somewhat like exhaling. Noro shifted, nostrils flaring as he breathed deeply. Her ear to his chest heard no obstruction. The faint smell of blood remained, some dry, some fresh. With her nose close to his shirt she also caught the faintest whiff of corruption.

  


She heard the tick-tick of J'sulo's nails on the floor as he trotted back into the back, She glanced up to see him come over to sit beside her, followed by the drifting shapes of the knapsack and the shield. They arranged themselves neatly in the corner as the chalkboard slid up to stand at attention on the edge of the bed.

  


“The cure took, so it wasn't a blight. Probably some injury got infected and it spread,” she said.

  


_She lied. I am not surprised,_ said the chalk on the board.

  


“Nor I. Can you get the daggers so I can look him over?”

  


There was an affirmative trill from J'sulo. The belt around the Dunmer's waist unbuckled and slid away, taking the two daggers with it. Malurai shifted his hips to make that easier. Then she set about undressing him. He hardly looked the same mer that she had examined last time, but she was almost persuaded that the face was familiar behind the dreadful half-healed wound. She stared in consternation at the deep scratches on his arms, the ragged mark on his chest, the old yellow-gray bruises on his shoulders and hands.

  


He shifted uneasily as she worked, and when she went to roll him onto his side he stiffened, clutching at the mattress in front of him for something that wasn't there, then at his hip. She was startled by how fast his hands were.

  


“Easy,” she said softly, sitting back on her heels as she took her hands away. “It's Malurai, do you remember?”

  


Now lying with his back to her, Noro inhaled deeply, then breathed out.

  


“Malurai,” he said roughly. It wasn't quite a question.

  


“I'm trying to find what made you sick so it doesn't happen again after I've healed you,” she said. “I need to touch you for that to happen.”

  


“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”

  


She looked over the marks on his back. Something had hit him a couple of times, leaving one sizable half-healed hole and one smaller one that did not look healed at all. The edges were raw and lined with a thin crust of yellow pus, and she thought she could see something stuck inside. The spell might have killed the infection, but it had not removed all physical evidence of it.

  


“That's going to need tweezers,” she said. “Hang on, Noro.”

  


She got up to go and a pair of steel tweezers from the drawer and bring them back. “There's something stuck inside this wound. It's probably going to hurt when I try to get it out. Try to hold still.”

  


Noro grunted acknowledgement. Now he was alert enough to understand what was happening, not frantic from some reflex below the level of consciousness.

  


Malurai carefully pressed around the hole with one hand, spreading the edges as much as she could, then delicately inserted the tips of the tweezers in to try and get hold of the small dark thing she saw inside. A half-inch sliver of wood came out, originally pale and unfinished, but mostly covered in pus and blood. It was thick and sharply pointed, the end of something else. She blinked at that, then checked the other, smaller puncture, but it was empty and shrunken. The Dunmer had not moved throughout, though she saw him breathing a little faster.

  


“He was hit with something with wooden spikes,” she said. “Look at that. He's lucky they didn't get his eye, too. It was close.”

  


_I'll take it,_ said the chalkboard. The tweezers and splinter whisked out of her hands, and Malurai turned to work on removing Noro's boots, socks and trousers. Oddly considering his expensive equipment, his clothes were less fine than the ones he'd been wearing when she'd last seen him, just homespun things with no decoration. There were no holes in them, so they probably weren't what he'd been wearing when all of... the rest of it happened. He let her do it without any further twitchiness. When she glanced at his face his swollen eyes were open just a little, watching her.

  


His legs were bruised as well, little scratches here and there, but nothing to what had been happening to his upper body. The toenails would probably grow back.

  


“Sahrid told us you were killed by cultists in Telesnaryan,” she said. She heard Noro chuckle weakly.

  


“She mean' for me to be,” he slurred. “She left me.”

  


Behind her J'sulo growled. Malurai nodded once.

  


“She's always been a liar,” she said. “I suppose she's decided she is done with you. She keeps coming in to tell us how she's fixing up Trammelwood.”

  
“Don' tell her I'm alive,” Noro said. Malurai rolled him over to check his other side, then laid him on his back. She could see the muscles in his stomach clench a little as he tried to help with this, but in the end he was too weak to be of much assistance.

  


“We won't,” she said. “You need healing, Noro. For that I need to lay hands on you, and I will need to cast a spell.”

  


He jerked his chin up once, watching her through the narrow slits of his eyes. Malurai pressed her hand to his chest as she sought among her spells for the most powerful of those concerned with healing, a brilliant white light pulsing in her mind. _Veloth's Charity._ She drew it out, feeling it flow from mind to heart to hand, and the spell flared blindingly around her fingertips as power formed and circled and sank into the body of Noro Laend.

  


He shuddered as the marks on his body faded. The furrow on his face became a narrow scar, a jagged pale line with puckered edges, but the mark would never be completely gone. It had been too deep and left for too long. She watched the half-healed wounds on forearms and skull and chest gently blend into his body and vanish, leaving behind only dry little scars where the deeper ones had been. With healing the last remnants of blood and pus dried up and blew away, leaving only the scent of clean Dunmer flesh.

  


He was still shaking when it was over. Malurai started to take her hand away, but he pressed his palm over it, startlingly fast. He did not hold her above an instant, letting his hand slide away to his side.

  


“One of the daggers,” he said hoarsely. “Yours.”

  


“Nothing I've done for you is worth a price so high,” she said gently.

  


“It is to me,” he said. He opened his eyes further, red-on-red, the pupils very large in the dim light as he stared into her face. He was breathing hard, harsh and audible in the quiet of the shop at night. Malurai was aware of something she had never felt before, odd little drop and twist in her guts.

  


“Well, we'll talk about it,” she said, tearing her eyes away with an effort. Her tone was very gentle. He was agitated, for reasons she did not completely understand, and arguing with him would probably not help. “I'll need to move you about to get you under the sheets.”

  


_Let me,_ said the chalkboard. Noro squinted at it, obviously trying to slow his breathing. Then he shrugged one shoulder minutely. His body hovered straight up above the bed about eight inches. J'sulo came and sat beside Malurai as she shuffled the coverlet and sheets aside. As Noro sank back down into the mattress she pulled them over him, tucking them in around his body. She felt the shaking gradually subside under her hands.

  


The scrape of the chalk drew her attention as the board drifted over to hover above Noro's face: _You are safe here with us._

  


“Yes,” Malurai said. “Rest, Noro.”

  


Noro sighed heavily, shutting his eyes. Malurai watched the lines of his face relax, smoothing away years until he looked a great deal younger than he had minutes ago. She sat watching the rise and fall of his chest for a couple of minutes, making sure he was still breathing easily. Then she got up and went to lie on the other patient bed, where she could hear and scent him. J'sulo curled up next to her feet on top of the coverlet, tail around his nose, his chalkboard tucked under one paw.

  


Sometime between when she fell asleep and sunrise, Malurai was awakened by a muffled cry, a sound of pain and horror. She sat up, nudging her brother aside to climb out of bed. He protested with a sleepy mew, then raised his head, blinking.

  


Noro Laend was lying with his arms over his head, curled into a tight ball. She could see his shoulder heaving up and down from where she sat. Malurai tucked her feet into her soft indoor shoes and went to pour a glass of water from the pitcher she kept on the counter. She gently scuffed her feet as she went, gentle and gradual reminder of her presence, and pulled the chair back so that it made a small scraping noise against the floor as she sat down. She curled her tail around her left ankle, habitually keeping it out of her way and his.

  


A red eye peered at her from between Noro's arms, and he slowly uncurled himself, pushing up on one elbow. She held out the glass. He took it in a shaking hand. It took him a while to get a drink without pouring it on himself. Afterward he set it on the little table by the bed and slumped back onto his side. They regarded one another silently for a while.

  


“What happened to your head?” Malurai asked presently. “It's not the same as the marks from the weapons.”

  


“Kwama foragers,” Noro said. “All the way back to Seyda Neen. They would wait 'til I fell asleep.”

  


“What about your arms?”

  


“I don't know what the thing was. It had hands like a Dunmer but a face like a dreugh's ass,” he said. “All tentacles. Bony sharp bits on them. Telesnaryan was full of some cult I've never heard of. There was that thing, and there were Dunmer with clubs, and there were a couple of things with no eyes or one fat tentacle instead of a face.”

  


“People in rags sounds a bit like worshipers of Namira,” she said. “But I've never heard of them turning into monsters.”

  


“Wasn't Namira. They were chanting something about some old tribe,” he said. “It wasn't Dunmeris like we speak now. I couldn't understand a lot of the words. Besides, a daedra will take any race, any person. These were all Dunmer.” He waved a hand. “I don't expect you to believe me. I know it sounds just as crazy as the dremora.”

  


“I do believe you,” she said. “The marks in your body are not invented. And there had to be many enemies there, to make Sahrid leave without collecting all there was to take.” She looked over at his pack, with the two daggers set on top of it in their scabbards and the shield leaning against the wall. “She is not afraid the way normal people are afraid.”

  


“I'm not sure she has feelings,” Noro said. “She can get annoyed, and there are things she wants. I don't think she likes being alone. But I don't think it's easy for her to be afraid or sad. I don't think she loves anyone.”

  


“You would be amazed how many people never realize that,” Malurai said softly. “She puts on a good show.”

  


“Those people have never seen her frenzy half a room to make them kill the other half,” he said. “No one should die that way. Not even the servants of Molag Bal. Not even – whoever those people were.”

  


“So she really did make you tear a man's throat out with your teeth?” Malurai said.

  


“She cast the spell. I did it on my own,” said Noro. “That's the worst thing about frenzies and charms. You snap out of it afterward and you remember what you've done, but while it was happening you couldn't stop yourself.”

  


“I'm sorry,” Malurai said.

  


Noro shook his head. “I was worthless when she found me. I'm still worthless now. Nothing has really changed except that she got tired of me, and now I have money.”

  


“You're not worthless,” Malurai said. “Haven't I told you Sahrid is a liar? I think it's much more likely she left you to die because she saw you beginning to gain the ability to tell her no.”

  


He huffed through his nostrils, but she could see his eyes flicker back and forth, looking at a memory.

  


“If you feel like you have nothing to give the world except money, there are ways to do that, too,” Malurai said. “But I don't think that's true. And if it is, you can choose to learn. Make yourself more than you are.”

  


“Malurai,” he said slowly. He was breathing more calmly now, hands lying half-open on the sheet. “When you aren't working, what do you do?”

  


“I read,” she said. “I've just started Volume Three of _A Dance in Fire._ I practice with the sword. Sometimes I go for walks around the city. Every couple of years I take in an apprentice, and their big test of proving is to run the shop for two weeks while I go camping or go loll around Balmora or Vivec.” She smiled slightly, thinking back to one of those trips. She was unaware of her tail lifting slightly away from her feet, ears perking up at a happy memory. “There was a little book shop off a plaza in Balmora's Commercial District that had the most amazing piles of cheap, trashy novels. I stayed in a lodging house with a garden on the roof. I sat in the arbor and read fifty of them in a row a couple of summers ago. I sold them back at half price before I came home. I've always wanted to go back and do it again. It's just never seemed like the right time.”

  


Noro Laend lay quiet, listening to her. She could see his eyes growing heavier again, half-shut, but they were still fixed on her face.

  


“If I need to go somewhere when J'sulo's out working, or if he's going with me, but it's not an apprentice's proving time, I have Naridanye's son over to watch the shop,” she said. “She's the alchemist up the street. Selandrian has a couple of healing spells, and he gets to keep what he makes while he's here. The important thing is that we're always open.”

  


“While I'm here,” Noro said. “Would you teach me again?”

  


“When you're rested,” she said. “But yes. You were a good student, Noro. I think you'll be a good swordsman.”

  


He smiled, the first genuinely happy expression she thought she'd ever seen on his face. Then he shut his eyes. Malurai watched him for a little while, until she was sure he was asleep. Then she went back to bed again. J'sulo had gone back to sleep the second he realized there was no emergency. He was now sprawled on his back, paws in the air, one foot still securely pinning the precious chalkboard.

  


The next day she was a little tired at work, and it was a busy day. A bad cold was making its way around the district's school, no threat to adults who were warmed and fed, but capable of killing the very old and the very young. She went back to check on Noro Laend when she could, bringing him food and tea from their shared breakfast, making sure he had water, making sure he wasn't cold. He slept for a lot of the day, twitching in his nightmares.

  


Malurai cast her cure spell over and over the day long, until her magicka was completely gone. After she saw the last patient out it was only five-fifteen, and she was leaning on the countertop, ears drooping, as her brother went around lighting the lamps near the front windows. The scratch of the chalkboard drew her attention. J'sulo was sitting on the end of the counter, one ear up and one ear flat.

  


_I think it's time we invested in a potion._

  


“They're expensive,” she said.

  


_Dockworkers get off at 8. Some will be sick,_ J'sulo said. _We will not lose money on the day._

  


“Are you willing to go?” she asked.

  


In answer he wiggled all over. A small harness with a purse attached to the back of it hovered out from under the counter, followed by the cashbox. Malurai put two hundred and twenty drakes in one and ten-drake coins into it, checking twice against the possibility of error.

  


“See if Nuncius will sell you some of the day-old bread from the back door,” she said. “We can do cheese and toast for me and him, and you can have the last of the nix hound. I'll shop tomorrow.”

  


J'sulo trilled acknowledgement. A second, smaller chalkboard floated out from under the counter and tucked itself into his harness, and he turned to trot out the door. Malurai nudged the bell to the center of the counter and went back to check on Noro Laend. She washed quickly and changed to try and make herself more alert, dressing in loose blue trousers and a tan tunic over the tight wrap she normally wore over her breasts.

  


She came back downstairs to find Noro sitting on the edge of the bed in his linen trousers with a wastebasket on the floor in front of him, shaving his head with a glass dagger. She winced as she looked at his shaking hands.

  


“Let me?” she said, holding out a hand. He gave over the dagger without the slightest hesitation. She pulled the chair over and went to work on his bowed head.

  


“You look tired,” he said. “I'm sorry I've kept you up.”

  


“Oh, it happens,” she said. “It's more to do with the number of patients we've had today. There's a cold going around, first of the season.” The edge of the blade rasped very softly as she ran it over his gray skin, a small rain of hair falling around his pointed ears.

  


Malurai had had a fair number of patients who were young men. All kinds of accidents could happen on the docks, and anybody could get sick. She'd even treated Naridanye's son once. That was how they'd met, and it was what had led eventually to her teaching Selandrian his first spell. It had been nearly two years before he could cast it without about a fifty-fifty chance of spending all his magicka and failing.

  


She had seen every species of body in every state of undress: pale Nords with fuzzy yellow chest hair, small tan Bosmer with no hair on them at all, Orcs in every shade of green with muscle rippling out to here, and surly gray Dunmer eyeing her askance every second, as if a betmer's eyes would sully the purity of their blood. There had even been a very handsome Altmer once who had been hurt in a duel, the most romantic sort of injury. He had been a good patient, too, courteous and unassuming. In none of those cases had she given reign to unprofessional thoughts beyond noticing the very obvious.

  


So what was it that made her feel oddly light and warm as she worked on carefully shaving Noro Laend's head? He was in good enough shape, but he was not a handsome mer, hatchet-faced and crooked-nosed even in good health. He was dull gray, not the richer shades of ashy not-quite-blue and deep navy that Dunmer tended to value. And now he had so many scars that he looked like a relief map of Vvardenfell, his face disfigured by a huge seam from above his eye all the way to his jaw, no neat little dueling-mark to give him a rakish air. She was aware of all of that very dispassionately, marking down every detail.

  


She ought not get all squishy in the head over a man trustfully letting her handle him. It happened every day. It meant no more to them than the barber, and it ought not. You should be able to trust your healer that way, always.

  


_Maybe you are turning into Sahrid, thinking you can fix him up into what you want him to be. Ugh. Poor mer, he doesn't need THAT again from anyone._

  


With that sobering thought she was able to concentrate on what she was doing.

  


“If you leave the towns again you ought to have a helmet,” she said after a while. “Keep things off your head when you have to sleep on the ground. Even one of the netch leather hoods would help. In the fall and winter the kwama foragers get more aggressive, trying to fill the colony up with food.”

  


“The leather shirt helped,” he said. “Holes in my chest'd be a lot bigger if I hadn't had it. Good advice.”

  


Malurai smiled.

  


“Downside being, now it has holes in it,” said Noro.

  


“Yes, that is a risk you run,” Malurai said dryly. He actually grinned at her for just a second, tilting his head to look up at her sideways as she worked over his left ear. It transformed his whole face. She couldn't resist grinning back. “All right, hold on, I think we're done. Let me check it over.” Malurai leaned over to get the dagger's scabbard from the night stand and sheath it. Then she leaned forward to brush loose ends of hair from his head, checking for spots she'd missed. She was aware of his shoulders shifting as he sighed, and when she leaned back his eyes were shut, head still bent.

  


“Noro? Maybe you'd better lie down again,” she said gently. “I'll put your dagger here on the table.”

  


“Yeah,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Thanks.” She pulled the sheet and cover over his shoulder as he slid over onto his side, tucking his feet up.

  


The tiny bell on the front door-handle jingled. Malurai got up to go back out, but it was just J'sulo, carrying a sizable paper package tied to his back with string and a small vial clamped in his jaws. She took the vial, wiped it on the corner of her shirt, and popped the cork and downed it. Magicka bubbled through her veins, warm and bright. She straightened without knowing it, ears lifting. Being almost out of power was a dreadful feeling for a career mage of any school. Being completely out felt as if part of her had died.

  


“Better,” she said. “Thank you.”

  


The tiny chalkboard floated up in front of her nose. _I'll put bread away. You sit up front._

  


“Yes,” she said. He vanished into the back as she pulled the stool up to the counter, nudging the bell back over to the side. A faint sniffing sound from the back told her he'd probably stopped to check on Noro on his way to the stairs.

  


As J'sulo had predicted, there was a rush of stevedores and other docksmen with colds after eight. Well-rested and alert, with as much magicka as her body would hold or channel, she could normally cast her cure spell thirteen times and still have a dram left for her Hearth Heal if someone came in with a smashed thumb or a cut. Already tired, at the end of a short night and a long day, she was glazed and swaying after the eighth casting. They stopped coming around quarter after nine, but she stayed up front for a while after, making sure, before she went out to close the shutters. It had been dark since four or so. The cold air folding in around her like water woke her up a little, speeding her sluggish movements. The street was lit by the lamps now, fog curling in and out of the edges of the broad circles of light, and there was no one about. She could hear laughter in the distance from the tavern in the next street.

  


She locked up inside and put the bar across. The warmth inside was pleasant. There was a basement below that was hardly more than a closet, just big enough to hold a boiler that could warm the floor and the water down here. Upstairs they had a fire in the kitchen area that they would leave burning all night, and a small pile of clean bricks for warming the beds.

  


Malurai checked on Noro Laend, who still seemed to be sleeping, and then went up to make cheese toast. There were a few radishes left in the cupboard, and an apple that she cut in half. J'sulo warmed his small portion of dark, greasy nix hound by holding it over the fire briefly rather than actually cooking it. He ate much less than she did, being so small, so a little salted meat could last them some while in winter.

  


She divided everything into two plates and carried it down on a tray, hooking the night table with a foot to pull it over closer to the chair. Noro sat up on one elbow, looking at her over his shoulder. He must have been at least partly awake.

  


“Dinner,” she said.

  


He sat up, pushing back the covers, and turned to sit on the edge of the bed. “Thank you,” he said. He had never either complained or remarked on anything she'd given him. But then, if he had grown up “lower than shit,” to use the phrase he'd used, it probably wasn't cheap and humble fare to him.

  


The room was warm, and as her stomach filled with food her head filled with fog. Malurai looked at the wall past Noro's shoulder as she ate her half an apple, thinking nothing at all. She did not really notice when her hand dropped to rest on her leg. She was nearly asleep when she started to sway forward. A hand darted out to catch at her shoulder, jerking her awake.

  


“Hey,” Noro said. His eyes flicked up and down her face. “You all right? What's wrong?”

  


“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry.”

  


“It's not nothing. You're passing out,” Noro said gruffly.

  


“I'm just tired. We had a run of patients late. J'sulo went out for a potion and I'm nearly dry again, even then,” said Malurai. “I'll be fine by tomorrow.”

  


“Go get ready for bed,” Noro said. “I'll wash up.”

  


“You collapsed when you walked in here yesterday. You will never make it up the stairs,” she said.

  


“Sure I will. You cured me, healed me up, and I've been sleeping all day. I haven't lost the use of my legs. Don't make me prove it by carrying you over there.”

  


“You'll fall flat on your face,” she said.

  


“Don't you want to save me that humilation?” he asked. He wasn't smiling, but the lines around his eyes had shifted in a way that suggested he was thinking about it.

  


In the end she laughed tiredly and went to wash her face and teeth and brush out her hair and tail tuft. By the time she stumbled out of the bathroom, the dishes were all done and put away in the little upstairs kitchen, and the fire filled up with wood, burning merrily. Noro Laend stood leaning his hips on the sink with his arms folded, still shirtless and barefoot in his linen pants, looking up at the small painted portrait hung on the chimney. It was a young ohmes, much prettier than Malurai, with beautiful green eyes and a laughing perfect bow of a mouth.

  


“Where's J'sulo gone?” she asked.

  


“He went into the closet by the bathroom and shut the door,” Noro said.

  


“Oh. So he's gone to bed. That's his room,” Malurai said. “I'd have curtained off a bigger space for him, but he wouldn't have it. We share the bookshelf, and my clothes are in the big cupboard.” She waved a hand vaguely through the open bedroom door. It was strange having Noro up here, in this more private space. The upstairs was divided into the forward bedroom, a short hallway with a bath on one side and a big closet on the other, and then this kitchen at the back of the building by the stairs. The rich blue rug that covered most of the bedroom floor and the heavy blue-and-green quilts were from the old house at Trammelwood, among the few things they'd been able to keep.

  


“Who is she?” he asked, nodding toward the portrait.

  


“That's our mother. She was an ohmes, like me, but certainly Sahrid is the most like her. None of us got her eyes,” Malurai said.

  


“What happened to her? Sahrid said your father's still alive,” said Noro.

  


“She ran off with a suthay-raht caravaner when I was fifteen and took all of father's money that was left with her. They drowned trying to ford a river in the spring of that year,” Malurai said. “One of the survivors wrote us a letter. It had to be sent on, of course. Trammelwood was sold to pay her debts. If she saw something she liked, she bought it.” She was aware that she was rambling on in a very uncharacteristic way, but the world was warm and foggy and she wasn't sure how to stop.

  


“Sahrid isn't quite like that,” Noro said thoughtfully. “She's very obsessed with being able to pay for everything she wants.”

  


“Because Mama ruined us,” Malurai said, looking up at the portrait as she leaned in the doorway. “She broke all our hearts, not just Papa's. She was kindest to Sahrid, when she was home, but Sahrid knew as we all did that she was the reason we had to leave. She knows she doesn't want to be like Mama, but...”

  


“She doesn't understand what caused all of that, because it's to do with feelings,” Noro said. “So she settled on the money.”

  


Malurai nodded.

  


“Makes a lot of sense, with a couple of things she's said. Where'd your father end up?” Noro asked.

  


“He is the garrison priest at Graymoth Legion Fort, near Dalurath,” she said. “It's a Redoran and Imperial town on the mainland, far to the Northwest of here. He got as far away as he could, once he saw J'sulo and me settled and able to take care of ourselves.” She rubbed her forehead. “I – don't quite know why I'm telling you all of this. It can't be of the slightest interest to you.”

  


“I suppose it's not my business,” Noro said, looking over at the stairs and away from her. The firelight cast his face in shadow, gleaming on the scars on his bald head. “You go on to bed, Malurai. I'll wake you if the bell rings before morning. I sleep lightly, now.”

  


“Good night, Noro,” she said, and stumbled away to bed.  There was a brick under the covers, and the sheets were toasty warm.  She was asleep before she had time to think about what he'd said.

 


	14. Chapter 14

Noro lay awake for a while that night, listening to the building settle and the wind blowing against the outside. He would know if someone were to creep up to the lock with a scroll while Malurai and J'sulo slept. He would hear the click, the sound of the bar flipping back. He would know. So there was no reason to lie awake worried about that. None at all. The urge to try and push something heavy against the door was a stupid one, and would only embarrass him come the morning. This was Ebonheart, not a half-wild backwater like Seyda Neen.

  
  


_She can afford all the scrolls of unlocking she wants now, and she can make herself invisible. And her feet are silent, whether on tile or gravel or stone._

  
  


_Still being stupid. She thinks I'm dead. She's got no reason to go creeping round at night when she could be asleep in her feather bed._

  
  


He thought about Malurai and what she had said, and the round soft shapes of her breasts unbound under her linens, and the feeling of her hands on his head. The first time it had been very pleasant, lulling. The second time it had been... It had been a charm, almost. He had been so sunk under the feeling that she could have done anything to him at all.

  
  


And yet that did not leave him repulsed and nauseated, like being touched by Sahrid did. Yes, he'd reacted badly to being healed, even with warning, but that couldn't be helped. No spell would ever be welcome to him while the ghost of old frenzies still hung around grinning red-toothed behind his shoulder. And yet with Malurai he felt -

  
  


Safe.

  
  


Safe was a dangerous word. It tweaked parts of him that he thought he'd killed before he ever met Verei. He'd only traded one managing woman for another, really, Verei for Sahrid. He had chosen neither of them. They had seen in him only a portion of raw material, like a lump of unworked clay. And he'd gone along, because what else was he going to do? Make something of himself? He had never known how, or had the drive to do so.

  
  


It wasn't as if Malurai was shy about telling him what to do. So why did that feel different?

  
  


_Malurai has no plans for me. She's only ever wanted me to get better, as a healer should. She said yes when I asked for lessons, she didn't badger me into having them. In fact, she didn't think I would really want them after the first one. She doesn't think much of Dunmer in general._

  
  


It was almost funny. They'd each come at the lessons expecting to be refused. He expected her to turn him away because he was from a lesser class; she had expected him to quit because she was from a lesser race. _A lesser race as some Dunmer count it._

  
  


_Why has she worked so hard at helping me?_

  
  


_Because “patient” is more important than “Dunmer,” that's all. There's no reason to get all emotional just because you've finally stumbled across a couple of decent people,_ he thought to himself.  _She'll never feel anything for you except the kind of concern she would feel for anyone as sick as you've been._

  
  


And yet when they'd talked, he'd almost thought there was... Something. Something else.

  
  


_Don't kid yourself. She was exhausted and saying whatever came into her head. And when you said it was none of your business she didn't argue, because of course it was, you stupid fetcher._

  
  


His resolve to send them money anonymously was still a good one. Then she wouldn't have to feel bad about accepting a gift from him, because she wouldn't know, and he would go far away and he would be free of this confusion.

  
  


_Dalurath is far away._

  
  


_Stop that, damn you._

  
  


Maybe he should go all the way to Cyrodiil. Since Morrowind was technically a conquered nation under the Empire, travel across the border was not hard. Nobody would be worried about his uneducated speech if he just sounded like some Dunmer from Vvardenfell to them, all other distinctions lost.

  
  


Still... property would probably be cheaper this side the border. He'd have to think about it.

  
  


Once his sword lessons were further along, of course. No point in rushing off when he hadn't really learned anything yet. He could deal with taking lessons from Malurai for a little while without getting all emotional about it, Noro told himself. He'd have plenty of time to go to the bank and consolidate his funds into thousand-drake coins for easier carrying.

  
  


And quietly buy a big pile of novels to send with the money. There couldn't be anything wrong with that.

  
  


_No, stupid, then she'll know it was you._

  
  


He eventually fell asleep feeling disgusted with himself, and oddly sad in a way that was very new and strange. He dreamed of blood and teeth and many lashing arms. As a result he woke up early and without the desire of going back to sleep. He felt stronger. There was no real soreness now.

  
  


Noro got up and washed and dressed himself in his laundered woolen tunic and trousers. The washerwoman at Arrille's had apparently mended the holes in it as best she could, too. They showed the new seams and patches, but they would do.

  
  


As much as possible, he avoided looking in the mirror. The scarred and lumpen creature who now stared back from it was a stranger to him. Some Dunmer were capable of growing facial hair, but Noro was not among them, and while he had resented this fact as a younger man he was now grateful not to have to fuss with it.

  
  


He went upstairs to investigate the cupboards, thinking he could perhaps spare the other two some work now that he was consistently on his feet. It was surprisingly cold now that the fire had died down. There was a pile of slightly stale bread, a partial jar of scrib jelly, and a small half-wheel of cheese that was rock-hard and nearly down to the rind. Bar some spices in jars, that was it. Noro shrugged and poked up the fire, then fed it from the box beside it. Then he looked for a kitchen knife and started carefully slicing bread. His hands were not steady, but they were better than yesterday. He'd be able to care for his own hair by the time it needed shaving again. He wasn't sure what to do about that. He didn't want to be bald forever, but he suspected it would never grow back right around the scars. Maybe he could shave just the scarred side, grow half a head of hair like some of the pictures he'd seen of young men from Mournhold and Almalexia. It would be at odds with how old his face now was, but it was the best idea that occurred to him for the moment.

  
  


By the time he heard stirring around in the back bedroom he had a good pile of rounds of bread and a merrilly cracking fire, and he was poking about the drawers looking for toasting forks. He heard the closet and then the bathroom door open and shut with no sound of footsteps, meaning J'sulo was up as well. The alfiq padded out to stretch hugely by the hearth. Then he sat down on it, rolling on his back to shamelessly expose his belly to the warmth. He made a sort of warbling meow noise at Noro. The chalkboard drifted in after him and settled next to his foot, chalk hanging by its string. He had earrings in his ear, but no amulet.

  
  


“Morning,” Noro said. “It looks like you're about out of food. I'll go and get some today, shall I? If I'm going to be taking up one of the patient beds for a while I can pay my board, at least.”

  
  


J'sulo made a lower-toned mraw that Noro took to be negative.

  
  


The Dunmer shrugged. “Can you eat toast?”

  
  


“Mraw.”

  
  


“I thought not. So _someone's_ got to do the shopping today.”

  
  


“Prrip!”

  
  


“You think it should be you or Malurai,” Noro guessed.

  
  


The chalk finally moved. _Malurai was planning to go anyway. She should get out of the shop._

  
  


“True,” Noro said. He held a piece of bread carefully near the fire, squinting at it, then glanced over at the scratch of the chalk. “It seems to me like she probably doesn't get out much. She told me she goes to Balmora sometimes, but I bet it's been a long time since the last one.”

  
  


_Two years. Four since we went to see Papa,_ J'sulo wrote.  _You could go with her. It's not a long walk._

  
  


Noro turned to regard the alfiq with one raised eyebrow. It was the left one, and he could feel it tug at the scar next to it as it moved, a part of him forever changed. J'sulo looked back with large innocent yellow-green eyes.

  
  


“You really want someone like me hanging around your sister?” he asked.

  
  


_Mal has never liked men. If she likes YOU, I can't stop her._

  
  


“She likes women?” he said. He nudged the toast off onto a plate, dropped a slice of hard cheese onto it, and shoved another piece of bread onto the fork as he set the plate on the hearth to stay warm so that the cheese would melt.

  
  


J'sulo warbled in a way that Noro took to be humorous.

  
  


_Not women,_ said the chalkboard.  _Not anybody. Just work._

  
  


“Yeah, that sounds like Malurai. What about you?” he asked. “Sahrid's always talking about arranging a marriage for herself, you ever thought about something like that?” He did not ask exactly how far along the four legs to two legs spectrum an alfiq would choose to marry. He wasn't sure he wanted to know, and he wasn't sure if he should feel guilty about that or not.

  
  


_Some day, perhaps,_ said the chalkboard.  _I enjoy my life._

  
  


Noro grunted. “I'm not on your level, you know. Either of you. I used to carry buckets upstairs for a living. Then I got addicted to skooma.”

  
  


_Yes, Mal said. But now you are a rich warrior._

  
  


“Now I'm fucked in the head,” Noro said.

  
  


_You will get better. Eat some toast._

  
  


Noro exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh. About that time that Malurai emerged from the bath with a pale blue tunic and gray trousers on, and soft tan-colored boots on her feet.

  
  


“I see I've overslept,” she said. “I'll make the tea.”

  
  


“Damn, I forgot about tea,” Noro said. “I've got cheese toast, though. Your choice of scrib jelly or, uh, I think pepper. We have to go get food for J'sulo.”

  
  


“You think you can walk as far as the market today?” Malurai asked.

  
  


“Yep,” Noro said. “Look, I've got a shirt on and all.”

  
  


“Well done,” Malurai said solemnly.

  
  


Noro watched her from the corner of one eye as he stuck another piece of toast on the fork. Watching her ears up and her tail held high made him feel... odd. It made him feel things he had never felt for Verei.

  
  


_But I should have. I hope she's with someone who does._

  
  


His father had always told him that choosing a wife was not about feelings, that as long as she wasn't repulsive those were something you could work on after. Probably in a lot of cases that was true. You needed something to live on, so you needed someone who had work near to yours. You had to be able to live with them day in and day out, so you needed someone who believed at least some of the same things. You had to know what you were and weren't able to do, and find someone who was able to supply your deficiencies and hopefully vice versa.

  
  


Thinking about his own deficiencies would only ruin what he had every reason to believe would be a good day. Noro put that firmly aside and picked up the plate of cheese toast to rest on one knee as he listened to the water start to bubble. There was a hob off to one side of the fireplace, a little black iron shelf, but there was also a hook built in for hanging the kettle on, and that was where it now hung. Malurai crouched on her heels beside him, ignoring the little table and two chairs as he had been doing. The very end of the tuft of hair on her tail brushed his pant leg as she set down a pair of ceramic mugs, each holding a little fat round metal ball full of tiny holes. Noro assumed these had tea in them. He'd only ever seen it made by pouring water straight over the leaves.

  
  


“All right, J'sulo, you'd better move if you don't want to risk hot water in your ear,” Malurai said.

  
  


_Cruel, when I'm lying here starving to death,_ said the chalkboard.

  
  


“Yes, poor J'sulo, cut down in his prime. Move.”

  
  


They spoke little over breakfast, each perhaps thinking about yesterday's events, but the silence did not feel awkward. It wrapped them both like a soft blanket. Noro washed the dishes and Malurai put them away. He was a bit surprised at himself. He'd always hated doing dishes. Maybe it was that he wasn't being told to. Or maybe the spiteful asshole he'd been had died somewhere under Vivec, just not in quite the way he'd intended.

  
  


He put on his cloak to go out in the cold. He wore the glass dagger and his damaged leather shirt, but left the shield. Someone might not notice the dagger from many angles. The shield was impossible to miss, and would be remembered. The shortsword Malurai wore was a worn thing made of steel. She wore it belted on over a thicker vest knitted from heavy gray wool. Noro looked at it as he followed her out the door, and not just so that he could watch the curve of... Not a lot, actually, her clothes were too loose. Still, the movement was interesting, the sway of her tail adding a serpentine flourish. One could imagine.

  
  


Noro realized he had been thinking about that particular topic a lot more often the last few weeks. He had been frankly incapable of it for a long time previously. He'd always supposed the skooma had permanently ruined the function of those portions of his body and brain. Sex had been incredible the first time he was high, gradually more dull and flavorless once he was hooked, and then he lost all appetite for it completely. He was past the age of frequently having inconvenient dreams, thank Ayem. He was surprised and relieved to find he was recovering, but having someone else undress him and put him to bed twice was humiliating enough without any of _that_ lying between them.

  
  


“Don't worry too much about J'sulo,” Malurai said. “If he gets really hungry before we're back, he can hunt rats across the roofs. He can find them with a spell.”

  
  


“I hope they taste better than the ones in Vivec,” said Noro, walking up beside her on the cobbles of the road. The street was already busy, guar-drawn carts rattling past and in one case a very rare horse pulling a chaise. It was white with brown spots, trotting along with loud hooves and head held high. He stared at it until it was out of sight.

  
  


“They're not bad if you hunt here or around the docks. They've gotten us through a bad winter before,” Malurai said.

  
  


It was hard to imagine Malurai eating rat. Noro had been thinking about something that raised a question – right, sword.

  
  


“Why do you wear a sword?” he asked.

  
  


“Why do you?” Malurai returned. She carried a worn wicker basket on one arm, flattish nostrils dilating to take in the day's scents. Noro had never been sure if an ohmes had the kind of sense of smell a suthay-raht had. Probably safe to assume it was sharper than his, anyway.

  
  


Noro thought about that. He was walking the streets of Ebonheart, where there were guards, and where the kind of crime he was likely to encounter was probably more along the lines of that poor bastard from the other night whose nose he had broken.

  
  


“Because I've had to kill more than one time,” he said. “I always have to allow that I might have to do it again.” He glanced over at her. “That's not your reason.”

  
  


“No,” she said. “Papa always said it's better to have it and not need it than the other way about. Ebonheart is not a very dangerous town, compared to Balmora or Vivec, but there's always the chance some slaver will see a young Khajiit alone and try and seize the opportunity.”

  
  


“Why stay in Vvardenfell, when you have to live with knowing that?” Noro asked. “Why not go to the mainland, where slavery's abolished?”

  
  


Her smile was small and wry.

  
  


“Father and I argued about the shop,” she said. “He wanted us to come with him to Dalarath, and he thought that J'sulo and I couldn't start and run a business on our own. We weren't raised that way, you know. And then Sahrid patronized me about it, and... Well, I had to try and make it work. I think back then I had some idea like Sahrid has, that maybe we could get the old place back some day, but now I realize it wouldn't be the same. The things I left there are not things I can go and get back. What was most important will always be with me.”

  
  


“Seems to me like you've proved him wrong,” Noro said. “Shop seems profitable, and you must've been there a few years now - ”

  
  


“Nine years. I was only twenty, gods help us.”

  
  


“Right,” Noro said. “And if you pull up and move now, you could probably sell it for a good amount and go live nearer your father. Unless you just don't get on, that is. I never got on well with my old man.”

  
  


“Oh, we do all right,” she said. “He was temperamental for a little while after Mama ran away. Well, anyone would be. But he's mellowed since then. The priesthood of the Nine is good for him, I think.” She flicked an ear. “I'm not sure what Sahrid would do if we tried to move away. She still thinks she can talk us into moving back out to Trammelwood.”

  
  


They had paced along Vine street for probably a quarter mile. Malurai turned to the left up another street whose sign was so worn it could not be read, but which had the rough likeness of a bird carved into it. People didn't stare at a free Khajiit and an armed Dunmer walking together here as they had in Vivec. But then, most of the people around them were Imperials. They had a society ruled by its rich men, like everyone, but the ability to become one of those rich men was not limited by race. Noro had been told so, and been skeptical of it, but it wasn't hard to believe in a place like this. He saw an Argonian with a basket full of flowers openly greet an Altmer who was setting out a cart full of oranges, and the Altmer smile in return.

  
  


“She has to know you won't go back there for her to lord it over you,” Noro said.

  
  


“She knows what she wants. She will twist the situation around until everyone else wants the same thing, or die trying,” Malurai said.

  
  


“Or kill trying,” Noro grunted. “Just not with her own hands.”

  
  


“Or that, yes,” Malurai said. From the corner of his eye, Noro saw her tail sway to and fro. She was not a very expressive Khajiit; the clear sign of uncertainty was unusual. “Why are you so worried about this? As soon as you're completely better you can sail for Necrom, if you wish, or any port in the Empire. We won't tell her you're alive. You're free. It's not your problem.”

  
  


“I'm grateful,” Noro said. “But Sahrid _is_ my problem.” He silently cursed himself as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  
  


_Have you lost your wits? She could charm you into diving right off a rooftop head-first. Or she could speed up and frenzy some other dumb fucker and then you'd have no chance at all, even if he didn't have any idea what he was doing. Or she. There's Orc and Nord women bigger than me. Even a few Imperials, probably._

  
  


_But she has to touch me to cast, and I have a shield now._

  
  


_Which won't help a damn bit when she makes herself fast, too. If Sahrid decides she wants me dead, I will die._

  
  


“I know you don't need protection,” he said. “Either of you. But I wish you were out of her reach all the same. I haven't known a lot of decent people, Malurai. Even fewer who were kind.”

  
  


He watched her face redden slightly behind the tattooed stripes on her face, and for a small instant he felt hope.

  
  


“Well,” she said quietly. “It is my job, you know.”

  
  


“Right,” he said, looking away. “Sorry.” They were approaching a big square lined with stalls, rows of booths dividing it into neat, broad aisles. _There's no reason to get upset. There was never a chance. J'sulo knew it, he just wanted it to come from her, because after all it is her decision._

  
  


“So how do you find what you want in all of this?” Noro asked. He lightened his tone forcibly, over the objections of the spiny twisting feeling in his chest.

  
  


Shopping gave them both an easier topic of conversation and gave Noro a welcome distraction. Malurai filled her basket with food: a couple of long loaves of bread, saltrice meal, a fresh jar of scrib jelly, little rounds of scuttle, a bigger wheel of Imperial-made cheese, piles of bittergreen and hackle-lo in net bags, slaughterfish fillets wrapped carefully in waxed paper. She ended up buying a small canvas bag to hold more. Noro realized that her purse was by no means light. The other night's privations must have been a result of lack of time, not lack of money.

  
  


Noro traded his damaged leather shirt for a small credit on a Netch leather cuirass, boots, gloves, and a hoodlike hardened leather helmet with goggles for over the front eyeholes. It was an ugly thing, patched together from odd-shaped bits of leather, and the fact that the back was sewed into a stiff point like a racer's crest said that if he slept in it he'd have to sleep on his side, but definitely no kwama forager would be able to bite through it. It came down around the mouth in two sharp points, and there was a separate mouthpiece that could be fastened or unfastened between them.

  
  


He could have afforded something much heavier, but that would have slowed him down. He wasn't even sure he wanted to risk the thickly padded thighs of the netch greaves making him waddle, which was why he didn't buy any. Maybe he could work his way up to chainmail, like some of the Imperials wore. He saw one armorer selling a couple of mithral chain shirts - _this week from Firsthold, Sirrr, four hundred drakes, special discount for payment in Imperial septims –_ but they were white and shiny and he thought he'd feel like a twit walking around in one.

  
  


The currency question made him think about exchange rates. If he decided he was going to Cyrodiil he probably should change his drakes for septims here. The rate would almost certainly be worse nearer the border. He had suspected his strength would not hold out sufficiently to get him to the bank that day, and therefore he had not brought his pack with all of his funds in it. He was right. By the time they were done at the market he was already weary, legs aching as they walked home. Still, he had his new armor tucked under his arm, and Malurai had food enough to last several days.

  
  


She had politely declined his offer to carry the basket, as well as his offer to pay for it all on the argument that he was going to eat a lot of it, but he did have the canvas bag over his shoulder. It felt like it had rocks in it, so it was probably kwama eggs. He had bought a few apples imported from across the Inner Sea and slipped them into the bag, and a weird yellow thing called a “pear” that was shaped sort of like the torso of a woman with a huge bum but that he thought would be interesting to try. He'd thought about a small flask of flin, but he wasn't quite comfortable risking it when he'd been clean of skooma for so long. If he'd been a smoker instead of a drinker, maybe. But he hadn't.

  
  


“How do you feel?” Malurai asked as they turned up Vine Street.

  
  


“Fine. Little tired, is all,” Noro said.

  
  


“You rest today,” she said. “Tonight we'll do another lesson.”

  
“Thanks,” Noro said. “I'll give J'sulo the drakes to put up, so I don't forget.”

  
  


She said something noncommittal. He did not reintroduce the topic of the glass dagger, because at this point it would look like he was trying to press romantic advances that were clearly unwelcome, and he didn't intend to be an ass about it. He had two friends now. Best not to lose them over something that couldn't be helped. Over the long term it would become intolerable, but there wasn't going to be a long term. There was only until he was recovered enough that he had no excuse to hang around any more. He would rest up, learn what he could, try to make sure Sahrid wasn't about to do anything stupid; but then he'd have to go. Best get used to the idea now.

  
  


While they were gone J'sulo had a look around the roof, but he couldn't pick up any interesting scent. The fourth of the five spells that he knew brought him no further hint. The rats would be mostly indoors for the winter now, in sheds and basements and sewers, creeping out only to grab what they could and run back into the darkness with it.

  
  


He put on his amulet, the enchantment warm against the fur of his chest, and went down to count up the cash box instead, with his chalkboard trailing after him. He sat on the counter as he watched the coins float out of the box and then in again in neat stacks. He was a weak healer – he would always be an Alternationist and a Mystic at heart – but telekinesis was second nature to him now; recasting did not even break his concentration. They had nearly four thousand in mostly small coin, about time to make another trip to the bank. That was excluding his own funds from his own work, of course, the ones that were stowed in his closet. He was sitting on about five thousand at the moment. Very literally. It made the cushion a little lumpy.

  
  


When that was done he got the key from under the counter and unlocked the door. Malurai and Noro had taken down the bar to let themselves out, but she had locked it behind her when she left. They opened at eight o' clock by the clock tower down the street, the one on top of Belleviere and Sullius General Clerking and Accounting, Ltd. J'sulo sat and stared intently at the door with the key in his mouth – coppery taste, not pleasant but familiar – until he heard it strike the hour.

  
  


It was rare to have customers early. Usually if it was an emergency they would show up at two in the morning and ring the bell until they woke you up, in his experience. Otherwise it could wait until after they were done with work. He could watch the shop just fine from his post lounging on the counter, and if someone came in needing a cure or something else that he couldn't do, he would ask them to wait until Malurai got back.

  
  


Around eight-fifteen the bell on the door-handle rang, and he roused from a shallow doze, blinking, and found Sahrid on her way into the shop.

 


	15. Chapter 15

Sahrid was followed by a large and very clean Nord, his skin red and raw around his neck and ears from scrubbing, his pale hair tied back behind his head. He was tall, but he wasn't particularly muscular. In fact, he was a bit gangly, his big rawboned hands seeming huge for the size of his bony forearms. He was dressed in a black tunic with the old family livery on it, a black pahmer rampant on a field crimson in front of a green tree. There was a silver axe on his back, with the very faint sheen of enchantment slick over its surface. Without touching it J'sulo was not sure what it did.

  


To J'sulo's sensitive nose the Nord smelled very faintly of something chemical. Not skooma. Maybe a mixed liquor he was unfamiliar with.

  


“Good morning, brother,” Sahrid said cheerfully. She was wearing very fine blue velvet robes today, and she'd had her hair shorn again, except for two short, tight little braids hanging down by one ear. They had blue beads threaded over them, and she had gold earrings. She must have had her ears pierced quite recently.

  


J'sulo propped the chalkboard against his legs so that she could see his writing.

  


_Hello, Sahrid. Who is this?_

  


“And where is Malurai this fine morning?” she asked. “Oh, don't mind the armsman, he's new. He is a very good fellow.”

  


The Nord's face had no expression, dull blue eyes looking around the shop without visible interest.

  


_At the market,_ wrote J'sulo.

  


“It's just as well. I've been hoping to talk to just you,” she said, smiling winningly. J'sulo laid one ear back. She ignored this blithely as she went on, moving forward to lean one hand on the counter. “Why don't you come out and see the new garden that's being planted? It's mostly scrib cabbage for the winter, but the hackle-lo looks promising, too. And the gamekeepers have just laid in a new nix-hound, very young and fresh and tasty. Malurai can watch the shop while you're gone, and when you come back you can tell her what she's missed. You could have a run through the wood, and come back to a roaring fire. I know you miss it.”

  


_Thank you, but we're very busy at present._

  


“You said that last time,” Sahrid pointed out. “Hold on, your chalkboard has gone crooked.” She reached for the edge of it. J'sulo felt the warmth of the spell building on her fingers and dodged back just in time. She caught the falling chalkboard instead, the glow of green magicka fading. He knew the flavor of power, had known it since he was very small. J'sulo backed up the counter, back arched, tail expanded to twice its size. He hissed, fangs bared. The power of a single thought jerked the chalkboard from Sahrid's hands so that he could write:

  


_OUT._

  


“There's no need to be like that,” Sahrid said. Her expression was one of sincere hurt as she leaned away, ears at half-mast; not even her tail gave the lie to her performance, curled around her legs in self-negation just as it ought to be. The Nord was watching her, not J'sulo, his brow knitted and his shoulders stiff.

  


_NOW._

  


“All right, all right,” she said. “But think about it, littlest. We could have grand hunts as we used to do. You and me. I miss you, you know.” Her voice was almost plaintive.

  


The Nord opened the door to let her out. He followed her up the street with head bent, never looking back.

  


J'sulo jumped down and paced around the room for several minutes. His tail smoothed a little, but his hackles were never able to settle completely. He jumped when the bell sounded again, but it was only Malurai and Noro coming back again. His sister had a slightly distant, preoccupied look, and it took her a moment to notice much of anything.

  


For her part, Malurai was quite certain Noro had been trying to gently warn her off, back at the market. _I haven't known a lot of decent people. Even fewer who were kind._ She'd done her best to reassure him: _I know what my job is. I won't be unprofessional._

  


Sahrid had used him and then thrown him away. He needed a friend and a healer, that was all. Not someone else looking for something from him, even if it wasn't the same thing Sahrid had wanted. It stung, of course. But she did care about him, she acknowledged to herself, and if that meant letting go of something she wanted, she was able to make that sacrifice. She wasn't nineteen any more, to hiss at him and go hide in the closet and cry out of misery and spite. At least, she was sure she could bear it until he went away. And at some point he surely would.

  


_It's stupid that I am even having this argument with myself. He is not a handsome man. He is only moderately well off. And his mind is broken. He might kill me by accident if I rolled over at the wrong time._

  


And yet – the voice in her head sounded a bit like Sahrid's, saying those words. And that turned her stomach. You could only be coldly practical up to a point.

  


Malurai frowned as she realized J'sulo was all puffed up. She stopped short in the middle of the room as the Dunmer shut the door behind them.

  


“What's wrong? What's happened?”

  


J'sulo ran to jump up on the counter and show her the chalkboard.

  


_Sahrid was here. She tried to get me to come out without you. I said no. She tried to charm me._

  


Noro wasn't sure what response he was expecting. Maybe something like _how dare she,_ or _that bitch,_ or whatever term you used instead of bitch if you were from a good family. He did not expect Malurai to just nod, ears flat.

  


_She waited until you were gone. She must have been watching,_ the chalkboard said.

  


“I don't think she's as patient as that,” Malurai said. “We do the shopping on Morndas a lot, and she's come in on Morndas a lot. She's probably been hoping to catch you.”

  


J'sulo made an affirmative rowl noise. Noro felt a sick tight feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  


_I did not think she would try this,_ the board said _._

  


“Me, neither, but it doesn't surprise me,” Malurai said quietly. “She's not getting what she wants. Stay put, and I'll braise you some slaughterfish. We'd better try and find a way not to be alone in the shop from now on. I can send the neighbor's boy.”

  


J'sulo lifted his chin, his hackles gently settling.

  


_She had a Nord with her wearing the livery. Armsman, she said,_ he wrote.

  


“Of course,” Noro said flatly. “I'm dead, and she needs a sword arm. She was talking to me about armsmen when we were on our way out to Telesnaryon.” He'd been right about her early on. He'd just gradually wanted to believe she saw more in him than that, that it was just a lifetime of surly misanthropy manifesting against someone who was ultimately making his life better. In the moment in the tomb when she held him, and healed him, and told him he was a very good bodyguard, he could have believed in it all. Of course, then she'd locked him inside while he was unconscious. That probably should have bothered him more than it had at the time.

  


Malurai pushed through the curtain into the back. Noro nodded to J'sulo, frowning, and followed her with the sack. It had been getting harder to think, fatigue clouding his brain, but the rush of adrenaline was like cold water down his spine.

  


“Tell me where to put things,” he told her, as they reached the top of the stairs.

  


It was on the tip of his tongue to offer to run errands if they needed errands run, but that probably fell under the heading of unwanted attempts to insert himself into their lives where he didn't belong. For now he put things away at Malurai's direction while she started on J'sulo's breakfast. This help she did accept, out of the urgent need to be downstairs in case her sister came back.

  


“Thank you. Go and lie down, you're tired,” she told him afterward. He did not argue. He laid the leathers on his knapsack, but he kept the dagger and belt close to his chest as he lay down on his side. He had always thought people who slept with a knife under the pillow did it out of a need for reassurance in case things went wrong. After all, he had reasoned, who was going to be able to defend themselves half-awake and groping around under the pillow?

  


But that wasn't it at all. He did it out of an awful certainty that things generally _did_ go wrong, and the knowledge that he would react before he was even awake. It did not make him feel better. Not at all.

  


That evening Noro pursued his sword lesson with a grim and ardent intensity, desperate to get it right, and only stopped practicing on his own after dinner when Malurai gently asked him to come and help figure out what to do with the pear (out of a desire to make him stop before he fell over, he was later certain). That was a bright spot, sharing the sweet and juicy new taste with them both by the fire. J'sulo could taste very little that was sweet, but he allowed that the texture of it was very nice.

  


Noro lay quiet until the two Khajiit had gone to bed. Then he took his battered bedroll, now laundered, and laid it out against the front door. He slept with his face to the threshold the night long, waking up at every night watchman' footstep outside. When the sun started to seep through the cracks in the outside shutters he got up and stumbled back to the downstairs bathroom, stuffing the bedroll under the patient bed out of sight.

  


That morning over breakfast Malurai was very quiet. And that evening, after the shortsword lesson was over and they were crouching by the fire with tea, she said,

  


“I think perhaps Noro is right.”

  


_About what?_ J'sulo scritched. He had a small dish of tea on the hearth, which he lapped. The variety that he drank was slightly sharper in scent, not-quite-mint. Noro had noticed that Malurai tried not to touch the leaves with her fingers, or have them near her nose.

  


“We should sell out,” she said. “Move to Dalarath. Out of Sahrid's reach. Property will be a little cheaper there. With what we've saved and what we could make off the sale we would be well enough set up, even though it'll take a bit for the shop to turn a profit. We've only got to make enough to feed ourselves.”

  


Noro sipped his tea without speaking. She already knew his opinion. J'sulo licked his nose and sat up on his haunches, flicking an ear. His earrings jingled softly.

  


_I would rather not have to kill my own sister,_ he wrote.

  


“Exactly,” Malurai said quietly. “I can't say that I love her, but I've known her too long for that to be easy. And – I've never had to kill a person.”

  


“I have,” Noro said. “I don't want you to have to learn. D'you mind me coming along, just until you get there? I'd be happier knowing you made it all right.” He looked at her sideways. “And I've never been to Balmora, and the shortest route's probably through there, right?”

  


“Yes. By boat to Vivec first. Then by strider to Balmora, then Ald'ruhn, then Gnisis,” Malurai said. “And then by ship across the Inner Sea to Dalarath and Fort Graymoth. We could cross the Sea from Ebonheart and go up the coast, but travel is more costly on the mainland. It's cheaper to cross Vvardenfell and then have a shorter trip over water. We can have our things shipped there and they'll probably be waiting when we arrive. Father can help us with that.”

  


_I will write him today,_ J'sulo said.

  


“You're sure?” Malurai asked him. “About going?”

  


_This was your venture. I was just here for the company,_ J'sulo said.

  


Malurai smiled at him, and though the shape of a feline muzzle was very different from the face of man or mer, Noro was almost certain that J'sulo smiled back. The alfiq blinked very slowly, ears high. Noro was aware of a history stretching between them that he would never be privy to. Hells, even if he'd had a sister they probably wouldn't have got on, on account of him being a fetcher.

  


_Even if she won't have me as anything else – and why should she? - I wouldn't mind having a sister and a brother. Even just a pair of friends. It's something. I have nothing. Before this I didn't WANT anything._

  


_Well, I do now._

  


“We'll need to find a buyer, but I doubt it will take many days,” Malurai said. “This street is busier now than it was when we moved in, and we've fixed the place up. It'll take a little longer not wishing to put a sign out in front, of course. Sahrid might see it.”

  


_Right,_ said the chalkboard. _We can have Selandrian stay a couple of days until the new owner is ready to move in._

  


“Tell him we've gone to Balmora,” Malurai said slowly. “It will not be a lie, and she'll think we're on vacation because we're angry at her. By the time she realizes we're not coming back we'll be far away.”

  


“I'd tell her I'd gone to Helnim, if it was me,” Noro said dryly.

  


“I live in my routine,” Malurai said. “If she's told we went somewhere we don't usually, she'll know something has changed. She is not stupid.”

  


“No.” Noro sighed, running a hand over his bald head. “She's not. D'you think you could pause in Vivec long enough for me to go to the Potter's Hall in St. Delyn? I want to see it one last time. You don't have to go there, of course. It's not...” He tried to think of a way to put it.

  


“Noro,” Malurai said gently. “Is the life we live here very fancy, to you?”

  


“Not compared to where you grew up,” Noro said. “I understand that. But the Potter's Hall is somewhere your servants would have shopped for their own things. It's not somewhere your family would ever see.”

  


“You don't want me there when you go to see Verei,” Malurai said.

  


“It isn't that. Verei and I were through before Sahrid ever found me.” Noro looked into his tea, at the shining black surface with no leaves floating in it and the tiny chain leading down to the steel ball thing that he now knew was called a tea strainer, because Malurai had asked him to hand her one yesterday. “She was – is - honest and a hard worker. I was some way below the people who sell in the Potter's Hall.”

  


“Noro, if you told me you were lower than shit and that didn't bother me, why do you think seeing poor people at their work will?” she asked, ears sinking slightly. It was odd to hear her swearing, even quoting something he'd said himself. “I don't think you really understand us yet. My clients are of every kind of person. Some are rich. Some are other shopkeepers. Many are poor. They work the docks or pick rags or sweep the street, or they beg around for enough coin to pay me, and those we have to send away without paying because taking their money would be a sin against the mercy of Stendarr, if you will excuse me referring to a religion you don't share. I don't think we're better than you.”

  


It was the most he'd ever heard her say all together, except for the night she'd been so tired. He listened carefully until she was finished speaking, sipping his tea. Then he said,

  


“I do.”

  


At this point J'sulo leaned over, moving very slowly and carefully, and bit him on the kneecap. Noro wasn't sure what he was doing until he felt the sting of sharp little teeth clamp through his pants and into his skin. It wasn't hard enough to draw blood, but it did hurt.

  


“J'sulo, you know better than that,” Malurai said reproachfully, poking the alfiq in the shoulder. He butted her hand with his head. “Especially with Noro.”

  


_I did not startle him,_ wrote the chalk. _He is fine._ The letters were a little sloppier than usual.

  


“What was that for?” Noro demanded, rubbing his knee.

  


_You insult us. We are not like Sahrid._

  


“I didn't say you were,” he snapped, glaring at the alfiq.

  


_Yes, you did,_ said J'sulo, tail flicking back and forth _._

  


Noro deflated, looking away into the fire.

  


“Not everything she said was wrong,” he said.

  


“I would guess that some of it held a grain of truth at first,” Malurai said. “But if she knew you that well, she wouldn't have left you behind and assumed you wouldn't make it back. She _was_ wrong, Noro.”

  


He was silent, unable to answer her. Malurai shrugged.

  


“Well, think about it. And drink your tea. It'll get cold. And I think maybe you've had enough catmint in yours, J'sulo.”

  


The next few days were more or less busy. Noro practiced with the sword and then his shield whenever he could, which meant he spent a lot of his days upstairs. He did his forms in the narrow space up and down the hallway, mindful of his elbows in the kitchen, sometimes diverging into the bedroom. He felt a little odd being in Malurai's room, but first, he had permission, and second, she was so fanatically tidy that there wasn't really anything personal to see. There was the bed, the rug, the cupboard, and a small plain night stand with a brush sitting out on it. He wasn't the sort to go snooping through the drawers. The picture of her mother was probably the most personal thing she owned, and it was right out in the kitchen.

  


He was still not _good_. It would take years to get there from where he was now. But he thought he could see the way, and with repetition his reflexes got better, his movements more under his control. The repetition was calming in a way he had not expected from a martial practice. He found that he liked it. There had been few things he had tried in his life that he actually liked for their own sake. When he was too tired to go on with this, or Malurai gently but firmly told him it was time to stop, he read the books she had that were new to him.  
  


 

J'sulo made a small, discreet sign from a folded piece of stiff paper that said _Shop For Sale_ and set it on the counter out front, where it could easily be whisked away out of sight if Sahrid showed up again. If asked, he or Malurai would calmly explain that someone who wouldn't come into the shop to where they could see the sign wouldn't want to work there, either. They weren't looking to sell to a speculator when the neighborhood needed a healer. To Noro this seemed like a bad strategy, but it was a surprisingly short time before they had offers. A green-scaled Argonian with big back-pointed horns called Where-Has-She-Gone offered them a price somewhat below what they were asking. She had slightly shabby robes and wore an icon of Stendarr, and standing anywhere near her raised the hairs on Noro's neck slightly. An Imperial also offered, a man dressed in velvet called Barsus Narlius. He was prepared to go ten percent above the asking price. He had no aura of magicka at all.

  


In the end, and not entirely to Noro's surprise, they sold the shop to Where-Has-She-Gone. She agreed to take possession at the end of the following week, ten days away. That same day Noro took his knapsack to the bank and turned most of his money into thousand-drake coins for easier transportation. He had thirty-three thousand all told now, after what he'd been quietly giving to J'sulo to funnel into the cash box for his lessons. He paid more than Malurai had asked. J'sulo didn't say anything about it. Noro divided the bags around his knapsack and kept the smaller coins in his own purse. He still had the second glass dagger stuck in there. He couldn't bring himself to sell it.

  


The Morndas of that week Sahrid came to the shop again, all apologies, carrying a basket of pastries and smoked nix-hound. J'sulo and Malurai accepted this peace offering amicably but did not agree to come out to the estate. Sahrid seemed to take this in reasonably good part, probably hoping to win them over with more presents. At least, so Noro was told later. He was upstairs in the kitchen, squatting with his back to the countertop and his shield held up in front of him like a shalk turned up on end, until he was sure she had gone.

  


On Tirdas the shipping men came with a big cart and loaded up the cupboard, the book shelf, and smaller belongings that were packed into crates full of straw and neatly labeled: _Malurai: Clothes And Bedding, J'sulo: Cushions,_ and _Books and Pictures._ They'd agreed to leave all the downstairs furniture and most of the upstairs, even the big blue rug. Malurai took such of her medical implements as she felt she could not do without in her travel bag. A new healer would probably want to bring their own things in any case.

  


Early on Middas a slim young Altmer showed up to take over the front counter, the first and only time Noro would ever see Selandrian. He wore his golden hair up in a high queue, and his eyes were big and eager and green. He seemed so young that Noro felt tired looking at him. His voice quavered as he said goodbye to Malurai and J'sulo, and he watched them all big-eyed as they left, eyes fixed on Noro's shield.

  


They went down to the docks with Noro carrying his knapsack and shield, Malurai carrying a large and ancient cracked green leather valise, and J'sulo carrying his own travel things in a tiny canvas harness-bag on his back. It looked hand-made, the stitches big and crude. It was Frostfall now, and the ground was slick with ice in the places where the shadows fell darkest. There was no snow. There would never be snow.

  


Noro stood at the rail of their ship and watched the docks intently, ignoring the chantlike calls of the sailors as they put to sea. He couldn't shake the worry that Sahrid would suddenly turn up and frenzy all the dockworkers. He did not even begin to relax until they were out of sight of Ebonheart and halfway to Vivec.

  


 


	16. Chapter 16

By late afternoon of that day they could see the Holy City. The cantons hovered above the sea in the distance like a herd of overcooked rolls, half-shrouded in a haze of freezing fog and wood smoke, heralded by the roar of water falling from the gratings into the ocean. The magic that caused the cantons to hover and their waste water to be purified as it was returned to the sea had to be among the most powerful in Tamriel, architected by the god Vivec himself. Until that moment, looking at it from far away, Noro had never thought of that. It had always just been how things were. He knew about Baar Dau, of course. It hovered over everything in a grim reminder of disaster arrested, its shadow always falling on the Shrine to Stop the Moon on the roof of the god's palace that stood perched atop its nest of tiered puzzle canals.

He left Malurai and J'sulo looking about in the Foreign Quarter Waistworks, agreeing to meet at the strider port by nightfall. He watched them out of sight as his hired gondola poled away toward St. Delyn. The alfiq was sitting up on the high railing, striped tail dangling out into space as he tilted his head to hear something his sister said. She was more animated than he had seen her, color in her face, one hand lifted to point out something new.

  
  


_Sahrid won't follow us here,_ he told himself _. She can't come here openly anyway. The Ordinators haven't forgotten who stole that spell from the Library._ Still, he watched the walkways above them almost unblinkingly as he rode. It didn't occur to him until he got off the gondola how deferentially the gondolier had treated him. Now he was scarred, yes, but he was dressed in finer wool things and new netch leather and carrying glass. Even nameless, houseless, so far below a Telvanni lord that he might as well be a shalk larva, he was automatically granted a degree of respect that he would have thought impossible before he met Sahrid. He gave the man an extra ten drakes out of guilt, unable to watch him bowing low beneath his conical straw hat.

  
  


Noro climbed the ramps up to the top of the canton with very little difficulty and only stopped to wonder at that when he was at the upper walkway. He paused to look out over the high plastered rail. Vivec was something to look at from up high. Gondoliers poled in and out of the fog like restless spirits, stirring the low cloud around them. The mass of people on the walkways of the neighboring canton of St. Olms was just color and movement from here, like the design in a woven tapestry given swirling life. And from up here he could see the massive tapestries that hung from the opposite walkways, the images of the saints fluttering gently in the frigid wind of Frostfall. No one would come and tell him to move along. No one would demand to know what he was supposed to be doing. Again he felt guilty, an alien and a foreigner in a world that had been familiar.

  
  


_Familiar and awful. Am I sorry that part of my life is over?_

  
  


_Nah. I can't even pretend I am._

  
  


He turned to climb the broad, shallow stairs up to St. Delyn Plaza. The archway was three or four times his height, the massive doors forming not quite a hemicircle together, tapered gently toward the top. He pushed at one and it glided silently inward, both careful balance and assistive magicka rendering it surprisingly light. There was no need to be able to fortify the Plaza. If the god Vivec ever removed his protection from the city it would be destroyed by the fall of Baar Dau, the rogue moon finishing its journey to the sea. No one believed that would ever happen. The city of Vivec had existed for lifetimes even of the Dunmer.

  
  


In front of Noro the plaza stretched out, broad and spacious, the small bricks of the floor fitted together neatly and worn by many feet and many centuries of use. Many paper lanterns hung from posts and bits of wood embedded in walls and buildings, giving it an eternal warm light. The mushrooms and grasses in their heavy planters grew and flourished. There were even a couple of maple trees, so tall and old that their uppermost branches brushed the high dome of the plaza's distant roof. They had never shed their leaves. The light and the temperature in here hardly ever changed. Buildings of dull brown clay stretched from the cobbled street to the under-rim of the dome without foundation or roof. In the Hlaalu fashion, their windows were just little translucent green bubbles of glass, inverted tear-shaped, admitting light but impossible to really see through. An Ordinator was walking away from him, straight-backed and glittering in his golden armor with the curly-toed boots, the crest of his helm swaying slightly as he went.

  
  


There were stacks of crates around every empty space at the edges, and people bustling around putting things into crates and taking things out of crates and hustling around carrying things. Noro moved away from the door to let another Dunmer out. He was dressed in brown homespuns that had seen better days, and pulling a small hand-cart full of wrapped packages. Because he was looking, Noro saw a ragged Dunmer in the shadows behind one of the big planters, raking the dirt out smooth with a small hand tool. He looked away before she should look up. She seemed calm enough about her work, hair knotted up on top of her head, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Reconciled to her place in this world, as he had not been in her position.

  
  


Noro wasn't sure what to think about that, even now. He turned toward his right, to the building with the sign that said _Potter's Hall_ in Dunmeris and Cyrodilic, and pushed the door open and went inside. The shape of it tapered slightly from floor to ceiling, giving the walls an inward slope. Long counters lined the walls of the large, low room. Every few feet there was another Dunmer behind a stack of their own homemade crockery, more resting on crude but solid shelves behind them. The spots right in front of him were most sought after, because the merchant who stood there would be seen first by anyone coming in the door. He was not completely surprised to see Verei standing in one of those spots. She had always wanted one.

  
  


She was looking well, still bright-eyed and energetic, slim but not gawky. Her movements were graceful and sure as she talked animatedly to a customer about the different glazes she offered. Her clothing was homespun, but it was newer than he remembered, very simple sweetbarrel flowers she had probably embroidered herself around the loose collar of her blouse. She wore her copper-colored hair piled in a bun encircled by a braid on top of her head. The pins that held it had pretty green glass baubles on them, no doubt bought from the Glassblower's Hall down the way. Unbound, her hair would fall to her waist, he remembered. Once he had found that very alluring. Now it was just another fact.

  
  


Beside her stood a tall mer with a small neat black goatee and a tan tunic with a scripture crudely embroidered in black around the collar area – again, almost certainly done at home. He was a good-looking mer, Noro acknowledged to himself as he slowly approached. Sturdy arms and shoulders. Probably could carry a lot of heavy things. He looked healthy and satisfied with his life, smiling slightly as he listened to Verei make her pitch for the new green plates and cups. Noro felt a slight pang as he realized that could never have been him, not really. He had never had the energy or the desire.

  
  


He moved forward to look at two neat lines of little smooth figures, fingering stones for prayer with simple details and tiny symbols of ALMSIVI carefully carved into them. Some were in the likeness of shalk, the outlines of the beetle's head and wings drawn in very finely. Some were round and had the outline of a blossom carved in around the symbol. Some were more abstract, just a small regular border nicked in around the edge. There were ones without letters, some black with recessed red or blue designs.

  
  


The glazes were very fine. Some were even iridescent, blue with hints of purple or green. Verei had been able to afford the new materials she had always wanted.

  
  


“Are you seeking an object of devotion, Serjo?” the mer asked him. “Our prayer tokens are new, offered for the first time this month. Humble objects of humble materials. Or if you wish to keep your fingers nimble, as a warrior always must, we have more secular designs for that use.” He took up a flatter token and tipped it over the knuckle of one hand, on to the next, on to the next, then passed it under his little finger back to his thumb. “Heavier than a drake, and it doesn't leave a smell.”

  
  


Verei had sold a stack of plates to the other customer and was now looking at Noro curiously, head slightly on one side. She was frowning very slightly, as though she were trying hard to remember where she'd seen him before.

  
  


“How much for the black one with the green border?” he asked gruffly, glancing over at her and back at the mer in front of him. The one he had selected had a blue-black sheen when the angle of vision changed.

  
  


“Five drakes, Serjo,” the mer said.

  
  


Noro sorted the small stake of one-drake coins from his purse and pushed them across the counter, then held out his hand for the token to be dropped into it. His right hand still had the knuckle scars of his first venture in Sahrid's service.

  
  


“Three blessings,” the mer said cheerfully.

  
  


“May all that you do prosper,” Noro said, and as he did he turned to look at Verei one more time. She was still watching him in puzzlement as he turned away. He pushed the token into his pocket as he went.

  
  


He felt lighter as the door slid shut behind him, a certain amount of weight shed with his five drakes.

  
  


_I'm glad that I did come. I always would have wondered._ He turned his footsteps toward the Foreign Quarter, but he still had a couple of hours, so he walked instead, over the bridges that stretched from canton to canton. He bought a scrib pie from a street vendor and ate it as he went, and then a bottle of comberry juice, cold and bittersweet with just the occasional seed. He was aware of a couple of urchins eyeing his purse, but it was partly behind his shield, a serious danger to little fingers. More serious malcontents looked at his scars and his overall equipment and let well enough alone. He was not afraid of having the knapsack cut away. It was stained and lumpy, and it didn't look as though it held anything valuable, probably a mercenary's repair tools and some dried food (and technically it did contain some calipers and the remains of his dried rations, because they hadn't gone bad and he'd seen no reason to throw them out).

  
  


He was more aware of everything around him than was completely comfortable, head twitching at sudden sounds or movements, but it was not the panicked over-alertness of his last trip through here. He took his time, and in the end he enjoyed it, walking boldly in the open air instead of slinking back underground as soon as possible. He had never been happy here, but he was glad for his last departure from the place to be a happier occasion. He bought a leather money belt from one of the outdoor vendors, wearing it empty for now.

  
  


Magnus had not yet sunk below the sea by the time he reached the strider port, a big creaking scaffold with stairs leading up to the level of the giant insects' passenger cabins. It lay across the bridge from the Foreign Quarter to the brown and frosted grass of the shore. The strider loomed up out of the cold fog, its plaintive call ringing out over the water.

  
  


Noro sat on a crate at the bottom of the stairs for a while, sitting with one arm thrown over his knapsack as it lumped up beside him with its burden of thirty-three thousand drakes. By then he was tired enough to be glad for a rest. One strider left, long legs swishing away through the fog, and another came mincing up as he waited, idly watching the bridge. There was no reason to panic if they were a little late, he told himself. There were book stores all through the Holy City, and he would not be surprised if Malurai chose to indulge a little from the profits of their sale.

  
  


In the event, he saw the two familiar shapes emerge from the mist and into the lamplight when it was just gone dark. His breath made a thin mist in front of his nostrils as he hauled up his knapsack and stood. Malurai did indeed have a couple of small cheap-looking paper-bound books in the hand that was not carrying her valise. J'sulo was licking his chops.

  
  


“Have you eaten?” Malurai greeted him as they approached the platform.

  
  


“Yes, I bought a scrib pie,” he said. “Did you?”

  
  


“Yes, we ate some things on skewers,” she said. “I think some of it was rat, but it was good all the same. And there were sweetrolls. We've saved you one, if you want it.”

  
  


“Sure,” he said. Malurai popped open the valise to offer him a slightly squashed round thing wrapped in paper, a rolled bit of sweet dough with a thin sugary glaze. He'd eaten half of it by the time they'd all climbed up to the strider. How long had it been since he'd eaten something actually sweet? It seemed like ages. The taste seemed inappropriately good, like something he probably shouldn't be allowed to enjoy. He licked his fingers with only mild shame as they settled onto the bench with their luggage tied up on the outside of the strider. This time he had no choice, though he was not thrilled at letting the knapsack out of his sight. The strider was completely booked up.

  
  


He didn't even really notice until they'd started that Malurai and J'sulo had arranged it so he was against the corner, with Malurai on the other side screening him from contact with the chatty Altmer lady who was her neighbor. J'sulo sat pressed between them. Noro would swear he occasionally purred, enjoying the warmth. He rode with his head resting on his paws, eyes half-shut, tail curled around his feet. The bench on the other side was occupied by a row of strangers, a youngish Imperial couple in woolen robes and a pair of Dunmer men to either side of them whose worn homespuns said they were probably laborers, perhaps visiting family in Balmora during the slow season.

  
  


Noro could not sleep with people looking at him, and Malurai was engaged with polite non-conversation with the Altmer lady, whose bun was so tall he could see it over Malurai's head and whose accent was pure Summerset, flutey and high-pitched. In the dark and the fog there wasn't much to see outside of the strider, though once the driver drew their attention to a daedric ruin in the distance, its uneven tower hulking menacingly against the rising moons.

  
  


“There's no saying how it knows the way,” The Altmer lady said at one point. “Maybe it's by smell. They never seem to trip. That'd be awful, wouldn't it? We'd probably go sliding out like a lot of grains of saltrice!”

  
  


Everyone across from them glared at her until she shut up. Eventually she went to sleep. Presently Malurai said,

  
  


“How did it go, Noro?”

  
  


“Good,” he said. “She's doing well. I'm glad I took your advice. Now I won't have to worry about it.”

  
  


“I'm glad,” she said. “I've got a couple of books by someone called Nalenar that are about a princess from Hammerfell who defeated some Akaviri and fell in love with one of them, apparently. It sounds awful. I'm not even convinced they'd be physically able to – ahem. Anyway. Do you want to read them when I'm through?”

  
  


“Of course,” Noro said, laughter in his voice. He was watching for it, and so in the darkness he saw Malurai's ears perk up higher. “You didn't find any more of the Wolf Queen?”

  
  


“I found one,” she said. “But I've kept it in the bag, because it's bigger.”

  
  


“Good,” he said. “I hope you'll show me your book shop while we're in Balmora.”

  
  


“Of course,” she said. Her voice was full of humor and warmth, and something equally warm and buoyant expanded in Noro's chest in response. It filled him and pressed against the walls of his ribs as though he might burst with it.

  
  


_I don't need her to be in love with me. I will take this. Whatever this is. For as long as I can have it._

  
  


They rode in contented silence for a while. J'sulo seemed to still be sleeping. The two Imperials across from them had dozed off, her head on his shoulder, his head on her head, hands interlaced on his knee. From the corner of his eye Noro saw that Malurai was watching them, her expression unreadable in the dark. He thought one ear might be slightly lower than the other.

  
  


“Noro,” she said. “If you could do anything you liked, go anywhere, what would you choose?”

  
  


“Somewhere quiet,” he said. “With a green place. And a bench. Maybe some books, and a garden big enough to practice in without scaring the neighbors.” He thought about that. “No neighbors. Not right close by, anyhow.”

  
  


“That shouldn't be hard to find,” she said. “A little place outside a city.”

  
  


“Do you like being around people?” he asked. “You must, mustn't you? Being a healer.”

  
  


“I don't mind it,” said Malurai. “I like some time to myself, when I can get it. I needed to make the shop work. It did work. Now... I suppose I will have to decide what to do next.”

  
  


Noro nodded. He could see the reflection from the backs of her eyes in the darkness, making them look like a pair of new septims; she surely could see him better than he could see her.

  
  


“You'll always want to be doing something,” he said. “You're a doing things kind of person.”

  
  


“Yes, I think so,” she said.

  
  


They did not talk after that, but Noro did not find the silence awkward. The strider occasionally called out, and the wind rushed softly past with the speed of its long strides, and eventually they could see the halo of distant light over the front edge of its carapace, bright against the dark.

  
  


“Muthseras, we are nearly to Balmora,” the stridermer spoke up from his position up front. The other passengers stirred, checking around themselves and adjusting their cloaks and coats, the little adjustments one makes at the end of a long journey. They could not see the city until the strider turned in a great arc to come at the platform, and then the passenger cabin's open side swooped around to reveal the view of the sprawling Hlaalu city. A great square-topped watch tower plastered with tan stucco loomed out of the fog on a hill in front of them, smaller versions of itself clustered around its feet. An archway not far off presently framed a pair of closed wrought iron gates. Strider traffic might go on the night long, but foot traffic clearly did not. The lanterns of Balmora were blue and red and yellow, the streets lit the night long.

  
  


Houses in Balmora were mostly the same unpainted tan color as the towers, but there were flashes of color from the signs hanging from the fronts of shops, and there were little gardens and furnishings on top of many of the roofs. It was clear that here it must never snow, and seldom rain; the roof was plainly treated as another room of the house.

  
  


The River Odai flowed through its own arched gate near the strider platform and out somewhere off in the cold fog, beyond vision. Noro could hear the distant roar of the water. Even near the river the air felt drier than in Vivec or Ebonheart.

  
  


J'sulo yawned hugely and sat up. He had his small chalkboard tucked between his pack and his body, but he had not yet pulled it out. Now he merely remarked, “Prrip,” and waited with the others.

  
  


The stridermer stood by the edge of the platform to offer a hand to anyone who might look unsteady; then he hustled around to start unloading the luggage and handing it down to its various owners. By the time they had collected their bags Noro had his land-legs again and was ready to take up the knapsack.

  
  


“It's a bit of a walk to the place we usually stay,” Malurai said. “How do you feel, Noro?”

  
  


“Good,” he said, flexing his shoulders against the weight. “I've never been to Balmora.” He pulled his lips to one side, tugging on the scar on the left side of his face. “You know, I never left Vivec until I was over forty.”

  
  


Balmora didn't _smell_ the same as the others. Ebonheart had a stronger scent of the sea than Vivec, down at the level of the water instead of hovering high above it, but it wasn't so very different. Here the air was drier, and the undertones beyond the obvious cooking food and distant sewage were of bittergreen and dry dirt and the kresh grasses that colonized cracks in the cobblestones.

  
  


“It's time you did, then,” Malurai said.

  
  


“Maroo,” agreed J'sulo.

  
  


“You know, I like it when you can't talk,” Noro told him. J'sulo trotted over next to him, looking up to see that he was looking, then hopped up on his hind legs, bit Noro on the kneecap, and ran up past Malurai.

  
  


“Ow,” said Noro mildly.

  
  


“What are you, five years old?” Malurai said, half-laughing, half-indignant. “You're not drunk now.”

  
  


He trilled defiantly at her, then tried to bite her also. She batted him on the nose with the tufted tip of her tail. He moved away, squinting up one eye.

  
  


“And that's what you get for trying to bite people,” said Malurai.

  
  


The lodging house proved to be built into the side of the hill that climbed from the Market District to the flossier houses up on top of the little plateau above it. About half its rooftop was buried, but the other half held a little garden that was still green, partly sheltered and insulated by the hillside, warmed by the two-story house underneath. There were wood benches and a couple of arbors covered in fat trailing bittergreen and a young trama that was not yet grown so thick as to threaten it structurally. There was less travel in the winter, so he was able to secure the entire upper story to the three of them at a lower price than otherwise, though Malurai and J'sulo insisted on paying him for part of it (and he lied unabashedly about the actual cost to keep them from paying too much).

  
  


As soon as he had wedged his knapsack into the least obtrusive corner he could find, shield on top of it completely negating this precaution, Noro went up to the roof to fold himself into one of the little arbors and look out at the dark and empty market. It was cold, but it was a clear night, stars twinkling overhead. In the daylight it would probably be noisy, but for now it was very quiet, the only sounds the sighing of the wind and the distant footsteps of one of the Hlaalu guards in their bonemold armor. Noro could see him crossing the square, holding a blue lantern in his hand. It created a small circle of light that traveled with him. He watched until the guard was out of sight.

  
  


The silence seemed to wash around him like a cold ocean, large and strange. At last he felt he could breathe. That was the feeling he'd had the last two days, as though he were holding his breath. Now he sat quietly for some minutes, taking in as much of it as he could, until he started to feel sleepy. Then he went back through the trapdoor and down the narrow stair into the upstairs to find his bed. Malurai wished him a good night as he went past her door. She had been awake, waiting to make sure he came back in. The small warm feeling this occasioned was a cap to a day that had ended much better than it began.

  
  


The next day they ate a good breakfast with their lodge lady, a respectable middle-aged Dunmer who was nearer to Noro's class of birth than Malurai's and who made an excellent roasted kwama egg. She was a widow of many years, but apparently the matron of a large extended family, so she did not feel the need to be aggressively chatty or annoyingly curious. That day he folded all of his money into the various pockets of the money belt he had bought and wore it under his tunic, hidden and unsuspected when his purse was out in plain sight.

  
  


The three of them had agreed to spend a couple of days in Balmora before moving on. They wandered through the market in a desultory way, buying guar on skewers to eat, and Malurai did show him her book store – it was piled high with dusty stacks of the paper-bound novels she had mentioned before. Noro bought a series of three that had a picture of an Orcish warrior on the cover. She had a big hammer over one shoulder and a hand on her hip, and the series was called _Volendrung Hammer of Troubles Book I-III._ Malurai chose a more salacious-looking set of stories featuring drawings of a male Nord in a loincloth in various provocative poses. It was called _Warrior of Skyrim: The Rebellion._

  
  


In the evening they dusted off a small fire-pit that was hiding in a corner of the garden and set it up in front of one of the arbors so that they could sit there with a blanket each and the books they'd bought. J'sulo alternated sitting between them and sitting on a square of rug underneath the bottom of the firepit, shamelessly stretched out to maximum length to expose as much belly as possible to the heat while having enough paws out the other side to hold his own book, a treatise on Alteration that Noro privately thought must be very dull.

  
  


Noro was pleased to find the normally very serious-minded Malurai constantly snickering at the contents of her chosen reading material, occasionally pointing out a passage to him that was particularly dreadful or dramatic. Eventually he started to tentatively do the same, and this met with such an enthusiastic response that before long they were constantly looking over each other's shoulders, and then eventually reading gave way to a discussion of what they had read. They sat elbow to elbow, sharing warmth, not quite touching. Noro was very conscious of having her so close now, as he had never been when she was working at being his physician. He was not sure how to feel about it. It worked against all of his intended resolve.

  
  


“You know what,” Malurai said after a while. It was fully dark, with Masser waxing and Secundus full. “Let's have a drink. I haven't had mazte in – Divines, I don't know. Five, six years.”

  
  


“I don't think Mrs. Neres keeps alcohol,” Noro said. His other objection he kept to himself. He ought to be safe having a dram of liquor in company with others, now.

  
  


“I'll go and get it,” Malurai said, bouncing upright. She nudged Noro backward with a hand on his shoulder as he started to get up. “No no, you have to finish the last volume of _Warrior of Skyrim._ There's quite an inappropriate scene near the end and it's frankly hilarious how little the author apparently knows about anatomy.”

  
  


Noro couldn't help grinning, seeing her more energetic and enthused than he ever had, but he protested anyway.

  
  


“It's after dark,” Noro said. “It's not that I don't believe in your abilities -”

  
  


“I'll take J'sulo with me if it makes you feel better,” said Malurai. “He's a man, you know.”

  
  


“It's not that at _all,”_ Noro objected. “Two can watch better than one.”

  
  


“Then I will still be safer with J'sulo. If I can get him to crawl out from under the firepit.”

  
  


A chalkboard, much erased after J'sulo's own occasional remarks on the contents of the racy novels, floated up to reveal the words:

  
  


_I will go. Risking death by freezing._

  
  


“Poor, heroic J'sulo,” Malurai crooned. A paw emerged from under the firepit to swat at her, followed by the very flat creeping body of its owner. In another minute they had vanished downstairs, arguing amiably in a way that was of course only half discernible to Noro.

 

He settled back to go on reading. There was nobody else in the lodging house but them and the owner, who would be in her soft chair by her fire until very late. He was not at all expecting to hear a knock resounding from two stories below him about a minute later.

  
  


“Yes?” said the voice of Mrs. Neres politely. “We have rooms to let, of course -”

  
  


“Good evening, good evening, Sera. She is not seeking a room to let, but rather urgently needs to find her sister and brother. She believes they are lodging here?”

 

 


	17. Chapter 17

That morning Ko'Sahrid rose early, dressed herself in a dark crimson robe that was fast becoming her favorite, and called for her smart new chaise and her somewhat less smart armsman to take her into town. Eivind Myarnde was already looking healthier and more alert than when she had found him. You couldn't get someone off the drink all at once, or they might die. She had had to wean him off it bit by bit.

  
  


That had been easier with Seretei and Talks-Just-So helping her, of course. Never again would she have to dive down a sewer and make do with the first rat she saw. Well, but that was an unkind way to think of Noro Laend, she acknowledged as she rode pertly beside Eivind in the two-seated chaise behind the matched pair of black guar. She had a bear fur robe from Skyrim across her lap to keep her warm.

  
  


The Dunmer had been turning into a strong and impressive man, just as she had promised. If only he'd given up arguing with her, they might have gotten on well forever. If only he hadn't suddenly ceased to be angry and become sullen and suspicious, always asking questions, he could have always had a place at her table, a security for his children after him. And then she wouldn't have had to leave him behind to be killed by insane cultists, or worse, forcibly inducted into their filthy and disgusting religion. Perhaps sacrificed to something. Whatever it had been, his fate had undoubtedly been horrible, and that was something she considered a very regrettable necessity, like the necessity of killing a beautiful but poisonous insect.

  
  


Ko'Sahrid well knew he would have outlived her, probably, but her children would need armsmen and servants, too. Not that she particularly liked children. Detested them, in fact. But so had her mother, and she had succeeded in raising three cubs, more or less. It was what one did. And Sahrid's children would never be paupers because their mother had done something stupid. On this point she was firmly determined. She might have to discipline them harshly sometimes, because children were awful little brutes, but at least she would be there and paying attention.

  
  


But she was wandering. She'd have to come up with a husband of good family before she could think about raising kittens, and before she was ready to try and arrange a marriage she'd have to decide where his staff were going to live. Seretei was shaping up to be a good housekeeper, but of course that couldn't continue if he came with servants that were actually Khajiit from Elsweyr. They would never accept working under a commoner from Vvardenfell, and one couldn't really blame them. It would take a great deal of diplomacy not to hurt Seretei's feelings, but she thought she could probably make it work.

  
  


With this sort of reflections she occupied herself over the long ride to Ebonheart. Eivind never said much, poor sad creature. She still hadn't the faintest idea what his story was, or why he'd been drinking himself flat at the Hind when she found him. He didn't seem to want to talk, so it didn't seem necessary to pretend interest. At some point she would need to know more about him so that she would have a lever by which to move him, but that moment had not yet arrived.

  
  


“Go to the market and fetch a bushel of bittergreen,” she said, setting a small purse on the seat beside him. “I'll be along there presently, I expect. Don't let me catch you drinking, or I shall have to use unkind words.”

  
  


Eivind twitched once, squinting up his eyes. He knew by now what “unkind words” meant, and that she could make him do absolutely anything at all.

  
  


“Yes, Sahrid,” he said, and muttered to the guar to start them moving again.

  
  


She went into the shop with ears and tail high, with no need to pretend. She would apologize handsomely again to J'sulo, and this time he would really forgive her, and maybe they would agree to come out and sit around the table like civilized people. Ko'Sahrid was somewhat put out to see Selandrian behind the counter, but this did not show at all as she went up to stand in front of him, hands folded just below her breasts.

  
  


“Why, good morning, Selandrian!”

  
  


“Morning, Sera,” he said politely. “Are you feeling ill today?” It sounded memorized, and she was mildly amused that he asked even though he certainly knew she was a healer.

  
  


“No, dear fellow, I am looking in fact for Malurai and J'sulo. Are they out?”

  
  


“Oh, they've gone to Balmora,” he said. “Well, they were going to Vivec first, but they were to be in Balmora by late last night. I understand J'sulo's even moved his Mark, so they must be planning a long stay.”

  
  


“Ah. They have gone on vacation,” Sahrid said, and did not completely try to keep the disappointment out of her tone.

  
  


“Well, I'm not sure it's completely a vacation,” Selandrian said hesitantly. “It's just, she's had one patient here for a long time and he went with them, so I think perhaps she wants to consult someone from the Imperial Cult there?”

  
  


“They took a patient with them?” Sahrid said. “That is unusual. Are you sure?”

  
  


“Very sure, Sera,” Selandrian said earnestly. “You wouldn't forget him if you saw him. He was a Dunmer, shaved bald, with an enormous scar from here to here.” His finger traced a path from hairline to jaw. “He had a glass shield and a glass dagger, and he had his own luggage when they went, so he must've been planning to travel with them.”

  
  


“He had a glass shield, you say?” Sahrid asked, as if she were only mildly curious about this instead of feeling blood pound in her ears as loudly as if she had been running. “One doesn't see many of those about. Was it one of the pointed sort, with the sharp bits at the top?”

  
  


“No, it was round,” Selandrian said. “About this big.” He gestured, indicating a buckler about fifteen inches across.

  
  


“Gracious. He must be a deadly fighter, to have such a thing,” Sahrid said. “Or very rich, of course.”

  
  


“I imagine so,” Selandrian agreed.

  
  


“Well, I must be off. Thanks kindly for your time, young Serjo.”

  
  


“Have a lovely day, Sera,” Selandrian said, the words again having the cadence of careful memorization.

  
  


Sahrid made her way toward the market slowly, now struggling to keep her ears high.

  
  


Ruined, he'd ruined everything! They weren't on vacation, they were running away, because Noro Laend had turned up like a bad septim and told them the worst possible interpretation of what had happened. That he'd had the gall to somehow stay alive was bad enough. It was really beyond the pale that he'd then stubbornly come all the way back here, scarred and hideous, to complain to Malurai and J'sulo. He'd been hiding like a coward in the back room for who knew how long, when Ko'Sahrid was doing her best to reconcile herself to her family by all possible means. Yes, she'd gotten impatient with J'sulo just for one little minute, but nobody was perfect!

  
  


What to do, what to do? They could be anywhere at all.

  
  


But no. Malurai probably _had_ gone to Balmora, because she was probably running to Papa to tell on Sahrid just like she always had, and the fastest and cheapest way to get to Dalarath was to go through Balmora. In which case, she was probably staying at the same place she always stayed in Balmora, because she was a creature of habit and routine and not a jot of spontaneity. She always thought she knew what was best because she was the oldest, and -

  
  


But these recriminations were unproductive. Sahrid had to catch them up as fast as she possibly could. It was a pity she wasn't in good odor with the Mages Guild, or she might have taken the Guild Guide and gotten there faster. As it was, she'd probably have to take a boat to Vivec and the strider to Balmora herself. It was annoying, she dared not take time to pack all the things she would need, but there it was. She'd have to do the best she could at the market. That perked her up just a little. She was always very careful to spend within her means, because dear beautiful _stupid_ Mama had not and Mama had ruined everything, but when she had a good reason to go shopping it was one of her favorite things.

  
  


By early afternoon she and Eivind were on the silt strider, the guar cart left at the livery stable so they could take a boat across to Vivec. She still had her fur lap-rug to keep her warm. A friendly young human, probably a Breton from her slim shape, blond hair, and faint aura of magicka, tried to engage Eivind in conversation as they rode. He answered in polite monosyllables, not unfriendly, but not really able to interact much. Sahrid engaged her in chat instead, because she was the only other passenger and it was wise to keep your hand in. That was how they caught you out, when you stopped pretending because you thought someone wasn't going to be important to you. You couldn't ever stop pretending to care. Life would go ever so hard for someone who didn't succeed in keeping up those appearances. Ko'Sahrid was sometimes nearly certain all of it was a charade and everyone else was just a more determined liar with a better understanding of all these arbitrary rules.

  
  


Oh, of course there had to be rules, she understood that. Rules got the privy cleaned and the woodpile kept up and the clothes pressed. Without rules there would be no fresh cream in the morning or safe places to maintain things like tailors and silt striders. But that was the only real reason for them. People just invented mushy-headed ideas about why you couldn't do certain things to other people because -

  
  


That was the part that didn't completely make sense. Somebody at some level had to _believe_ in it all, or the servants and the privy cleaners and the dairymen wouldn't do anything they weren't whipped into doing. Otherwise why would there be such an elaborate masquerade as the Imperial Cult of the Nine Divines? Daedra, yes. The Tribunal, yes. All of those were real and able to give power to mortals, if they wished to do so. But why invent nine magical sky-people who never did anything here if the point was just to have rules that kept the world working? There were many questions she had learned never to ask because they had caused people to look at her funny when she was little, and then she heard a guest in her parents' house telling her mother she ought to be locked up while there was still time. That had annoyed her. Nobody'd ever really answered her questions. They acted like she was supposed to just know the answers on her own, somehow.

  
  


And then things like _this_ happened. Everything had been going so well. And now it was ruined, ruined, ruined. The syllables chanted in her head over and over again on the trip from Vivec to Balmora. She had told Eivind only that they were going to see her brother and sister; but she knew what had to be done. Nothing could really fix it, so there remained only to make Noro Laend pay for it. Possibly Malurai as well. She was more reluctant in that case, but she suspected that if Malurai were not always around to boss him, J'sulo would fall into line much more easily.

  
  


And that was how it came about that Noro found himself sitting paralyzed, listening to the lodgelady tell Sahrid that the two of them had gone out, but they would be back any moment, and the Dunmer gentleman was up on the roof with the firepit if she liked to go and chat with him until then.

  
  


Noro's shield was downstairs, but his dagger was on his hip. He was never without it in reach. As he listened to the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs, he recognized that there was no chance in Hell that it would save him. Noro forced himself to lay down the book and put the blanket aside and stand up slowly, one hand on the arbor and the other on the hilt of the dagger.

  
  


The first thing to appear above the top of the stairs was the head and shoulders of a straw-haired Nord in a black tunic. Noro recognized his replacement with pity rather than anger. He stopped, looking around. Noro could not see Sahrid waiting below the stairs out of sight, but he had no question in his mind that she was there.

  
  


“So you've followed us after all,” Noro said quietly. The Nord's eyes snapped to him, brows knit. “Well, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. I used to be in your place.”

  
  


He did not see Sahrid cast her spells. She must already be nearly invisible. He only saw the Nord start to shake, and then a blood vessel burst in one of his eyes so that red bloomed across the white, so bright that it was visible even in the weak light of the firepit, and he hurled himself forward in a blur of indistinguishable movement. Noro stepped past the firepit, reaching futilely for his dagger – he must be so slow to the human, as if he were underwater – and then a bony fist hit him in the chest traveling at supernatural speed and he felt his ribs crack. He thrust the dagger forward and it was batted away instantly, even as he was hit again: in the belly, in the shoulder, in the chest again, knocking the wind out of him and producing another sharp _crack_ and another shooting pain as more of his ribs broke.

  
  


A kick so fast he didn't even see it hit Noro's left shin, and that broke, too. It didn't even hurt at first. He just felt it go, felt it fold up from the middle, and then he fell. He covered his head with his arms as best he could. Fortunately or unfortunately, the frenzied man was too out of his mind with rage to actually aim. He kicked the same spot on Noro's right knee three times in a row because it was half-covering his aching belly and the mess of swelling agony that was his chest. The dagger was on the ground next to him, unnoticed. It might as well have been in Oblivion.

  
  


He would have died right there if not for the sudden shout from the ground below, heard over the short parapet near them. Out in the marketplace someone was drunkenly laughing. The man stopped moving, foot pulled back for another kick, as he stared around him. Bloody drool ran down his chin from where he'd bitten his own lip or tongue. Noro lay quite still, trying not to breathe. He remembered little of his own frenzies, but he had a vague idea that he tended to focus on things that were moving first.

  
  


Noro didn't know exactly what the man saw, only that it seemed to make him even angrier. He turned and then he was moving too fast to be seen, and then the blur of him vanished over the edge. Sheer furious momentum seemed to keep him going out in the air for a few feet before he curved down out of sight, suddenly “slowed” to the speed of gravity. He vanished with a scream of rage.

  
  


Something was wrong inside him. Noro felt that he could not take a full breath, and blood bubbled on his lips as he wheezed in air. He reached for the dagger in front of him only to have a weight slam down on his hand. He hissed in pain as he recognized the hateful ripple in the air.

  
  


“Poor, poor Noro,” said a voice that sounded genuinely sorrowful. “His lung is punctured. He will be dead in less than an hour if nobody comes to save him. Of course, there is always a chance someone will. So we'd better not waste time.” The dagger flicked upward into the air. The tone of the voice changed, growing more silken with spite. “You've ruined everything. Everything! Now I'll have to kill Malurai just for a chance at having _one_ of them come and stay!”

  
  


Behind Sahrid something was rising slowly into view from the stairwell. Something very small, with two little points at the top of it. Something blue and brilliant spiraled up around it. Noro could not feel the discharge of magicka, but Sahrid must have. He heard her hiss, and then the weight vanished from his now-crushed hand. She became a blur of fast movement, so that his failing vision could not even track the ripple in the air.

  
  


And shrieked. He squinted. It looked like she was writhing in midair, still translucent, but held off the roof entirely.

  
  


Malurai stepped calmly up onto the roof, magicka just fading from around her as well.

  
  


“I don't know that I like your chances,” she said.

  
  


“No, no! Put me down! You've misunderstood,” pleaded Sahrid. The spell dissipated from around her, showing her flailing her arms in a futile attempt to stay upright as she spun gently eighteen inches above the roof's surface. A robe of rich crimson velvet flapped around her. Her ears were flat, for the first time Noro had ever seen, he realized blurrily. Suddenly she snapped into a position of perfect inertia as J'sulo's chalkboard hovered up into her view. Even from where he was he could read the blurry big word NO. J'sulo trotted up onto the rooftop, crouching with ears down and tail lashing. His eyes were golden and huge, reflecting the fire.

  
  


Malurai was out of Noro's view for a few seconds, but he heard her footsteps approaching. Then she was in front of him and he was looking at one of her knees as a hand rested on his shoulder.

  
  


“Sahrid, what have you done?” he heard her say. Her voice was weary.

  
  


“He attacked me! Eivind lost his own life trying to defend me!”

  
  


“Eivind isn't dead, just hurt badly,” Malurai said. “Noro, it's Malurai. It's going to be all right.”

  
  


“Good,” he whispered. Malurai and J'sulo were safe. He could stop worrying about it, and in that moment he stopped trying. He was aware of the very beginning of the warm tingling power of the spell traveling through him as everything faded.

  
  


He was lying on something soft, he realized first. No, not lying. Sitting, his head held firmly against something warm and yielding. He could hear a heart beating quickly against his ear. There were arms around him. The skin that touched his neck had no fur on it.

  
  


“Please,” someone was saying urgently.

  
  


“Hmn?” he said groggily. Nothing hurt, which seemed wrong.

  
  


“Noro, do you hear me?”

  
  


He blinked his eyes open and was looking at... mostly a breast. Blurry view of a room beyond it, bathed in the light of early morning from the green glass windows.

  
  


“Oh, I see,” he said. “I've reached Aetherius after all. That's unexpected.”

  
  


“You silly bastard,” said a voice. He _oofed_ as he was dumped onto his side on what was definitely one of the lodging house's guest beds, fat quilt cushioning his elbow as he pushed himself up on it. Malurai sat on the edge of the bed, still dressed in the plain tan tunic and trousers she'd been wearing before. J'sulo sat on a stool behind her, head on one side as his tail stood up in a questioning arc.

  
  


Malurai was smiling at him, but her eyes looked funny. Kind of red and damp.

  
  


“Hey,” Noro said. He sat up carefully. Things continued to not hurt.

  
  


“Hey,” Malurai said softly. “It was a near thing, Noro. I'm glad to see you up.”

  
  


“What about Sahrid?” he asked. “And that armsman – poor fetcher.”

  
  


A scritching noise drew his attention to J'sulo's chalkboard.

  
  


_Imperial custody. Drain magicka, drain fatigue bracers._ He paused to erase and write again.  _Eivind was healed and let go. He did nothing of his own will._

  
  


“I'm not sure a cell will hold her,” Malurai said. “Not even with the bracer on. But by the time she's able to escape we should be far away, and by the time she could get to Dalarath we will be in Cyrodiil, I hope. Would you like to go to Cyrodiil, Noro?”

  
  


“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would.” He saw her swallow, looking away from him. Noro held out an arm. “Aw, Mal, come on. It's all right. I'm sorry about her, but -”

  
  


“It was going to happen sooner or later,” Malurai said quietly. She fitted herself into the curve of his arm, head resting on his shoulder. He could smell the scent of her hair as he rested his cheek against her head. Nothing could possibly be more right and proper. “And now Trammelwood will probably be seized by the Empire. Well, we weren't going back anyway.”

  
  


“No,” Noro said. “Let the past be the past. Malurai, I -”

  
  


“I know,” she whispered into his shirt. “You need a friend and a healer, nothing else. I won't make myself a nuisance, I promise. It's just – I was worried.”

  
  


“What?” Noro said, blinking. He looked at J'sulo. “Did you tell her that?”

  
  


_Of course not,_ said the chalkboard.

  
  


“Good, because it's not true,” he said. “I know I'm not of your class - ”

  
  


_I WILL bite you,_ warned the chalk. J'sulo eyed his kneecaps speculatively.

  
  


“I'm not afraid of you,” Noro said dryly.

  
  


_Good. We'll be seeing a lot of one another._

  
  


Malurai had adjusted her position just enough to read the board, but had made no attempt to move away.

  
  


“What I was going to say was that I always assumed nothing could pass between us because we have so little in common, but I've always wished that it would. You are beautiful. Clever. Determined. And when you talk you make me want to listen, not to be somewhere else,” Noro said. “I would still like to find my green place, Malurai. But I would like for it to be a place for you, too. And J'sulo, and your father, and a big pile of books. I know things cost more in Cyrodiil, but if we pool our money we should be able to make it work. I – I'm rattling on, I know I am.”

  
  


“No,” Malurai said, and squeezed him so hard he thought his ribs would crack again. “No, you're not. We _will_ make it work. And if the money runs out, well, there's always need for a healer somewhere.”

  
  


“And there's always need for a sword,” Noro said. “I understand the Fighters Guild is active in Cyrodiil, too.”

  
  


“You're not ready for that yet,” Malurai said firmly, without letting go or looking up.

  
  


“Your sister's bossy,” he said to J'sulo.

  
  


_Yes. Good that you know in advance._

  
  


“Is your father going to have an apoplexy and die when we tell him?” Noro asked.

  
  


“No,” Malurai said. “Not when we've explained that you're strong, and responsible, and that you'll still be with me fifty years hence.”

  
  


“Unless I fall off a silt strider or something,” Noro said.

  
  


“Well, they don't have them in Cyrodiil. So that's a start. Are you ready to pack up?” she asked.

  
  


“For me to do that, you'll have to let go,” Noro said.

  
  


J'sulo made an amused chirring noise and vanished out the door toward the little upstairs parlor. The door clicked shut behind him.

  
  


“Here's the thing,” Malurai said, loosening her grip only so that she could look up into his face. He had seen her look dully busy; seen her look calm and absorbed; seen her look mildly concerned. He had ever seen that fervent heat burning in her yellow eyes. It stirred something inside him that he no longer felt the need to fight down. He could see the future stretching on ahead, full of hope and promise and hilariously terrible novels.

  
  


“I don't want to let go,” said Malurai.

  
  


  
  


 


	18. Afterward

Ko'Sahrid was a very cooperative prisoner. If you weren't cooperative, you made enemies of the guards and the other prisoners to boot, and that would only make things worse. Unfortunately she only got to tell her side of the story once, to a tired man with a parchment and quill that turned out to be a lesser magistrate. He did not seem very interested even though she was convincingly distraught, eyes red from knuckling them until they wept. Sahrid was not able to naturally weep. She'd never been sure how people did it.

  
  


The day after the sad little man came to listen to her story, the guard came to unlock the door to her cell. She stood up hurriedly, rubbing at the many-times-accursed bracer. It kept her magicka so low that the world felt dull and dead, another misery on top of the misery of this cold little stone room with its one bench and table and its sad little cot. It stank of straw and piss and old vomit. She was dressed in brown linens with a woolen tunic over them in concession to the cold, her big footpads unshielded from the frigid floor. They'd taken her other clothes. The woman who searched her had been nice enough about it, but remembering that experience still heated her face with humiliation, one of the things that definitely was real because Sahrid knew just exactly what it was like.

  
  


“Come on,” grunted the guard. “You're being sent off with the others.”  
  
“Others, what others?” asked Sahrid, as politely as possible, in her cutest and most sympathetic accents. “She has had no trial.”

  
  


“Won't be a public trial. You attacked three, technically four citizens of the Empire, all of whom testified. You've already been sentenced. Just thank your lucky stars Carrian's got a lot of decani running low on conscripts after the unrest down on the border of the Marsh.”

  
  


“Decani – she has been sold to the _Legion?”_ Sahrid gaped at him. He nudged her arm with his spear. She hurried out of the cell and into a line of others as someone snapped irons around her ankles. It was a struggle to keep her ears from going flat, but she managed it, whisking her tail out of the way to avoid having it pinched. The big green-skinned Orc in front of her glanced back curiously, swishing a short fat queue that hung down the back of his otherwise bald skull. He smelled a lot like Orc. Ugh.

  
  


“Oh no. Can't sell a citizen. Slavery's against the law,” the guard said. “But if you don't want to spend a few years rotting in an Imperial prison I'd keep your mouth shut. A powerful mage like you could go far in this man's Legion.”

  
  


“Muh,” Sahrid said, nearly speechless with shock and outrage. She had to start walking then, hobbling along in her irons, or be dragged off her feet by the Orc's patient progress.

  
  


Out in the courtyard was a big wagon with a canvas cover. They were all climbing a big ramp into it.

  
  


If they wanted her to be a battlemage, they'd have to take the bracer off. Sooner or later. She only had to wait.

  
  


Sahrid climbed into the wagon, ears high, tail held in a defiant arch.

  
  


  
  


  
  


** THE END **

 


End file.
